Games that don't allow you to pause or skip cutscenes.
Games that have you have a lot of conversations but don't bother animating the characters' facial expressions, so you have two emotionless people blankly staring at one another and rattling off a discussion that usually has something to do with saving the town/world/galaxy
Unskippable cutscenes that occur immediately after a checkpoint come in a very close second.
Never-ending waves of enemies when there's little (if any) indication of what other thing you should be doing instead of clearing the area.
Then the inverse: having an NPC yell and scream at you to keep moving forward when the scripting is blatantly location-triggered rather than time-triggered, especially if the game generally encourages hunting for items and collectibles.
Things such as long cut scenes. Those ones where talking heads go back and forth about the things that don't help me level my pokemon. Especially the ones that you have to press a button after they're done so you have to sit there spamming a button waiting for them to be done.
I prefer, for example, how HL2 would have everything go down, but you could at least still look around and move. This can easily be done very wrong like in AC2 where you have to wonder around walking slow for the first 30 minutes while everyone around you talks your head off about god-knows-what.
I have friends that love those dvd menu games, but they're just not for me.
Lack luster animation, lack of proper blending and lip sync tops my list.
After that, its stuff like highly destructible objects being next to invulnerable objects of far flimsier construction.
Why is it that a car explodes and shatter a brick wall but the broken wooden fence that looks like its about to fall over in a stiff breeze, takes no damage?
Or the indestructible pop can you can keep kicking around with round after round from your rocket launcher, effectively turning it into a make shift companion cube.
I understand why it is the worlds are set up like they are, but it still bugs me a little.
Being buggy because they didn't spend enough time playtesting, and then putting out no patches.
Insurmountable knee-high walls
Games that do voice acting in just one take and just run with it.
Characters with annoying voices that won't shut up
NPCs that are annoying hindrances that aren't designed to be for a reason. "Squadmates" almost universally fall into this category (Operation Flashpoint being one of the few instances where I remember folks actually doing what I told them reliably. Which, considering, shouldn't AI be better now instead of worse in that regard?)
Grinding. When playing a video game becomes a boring chore, I might as well get off my ass and do productive boring chores instead.
Games with a tacked-on multiplayer or a tacked-on single player that suck, suck, suck, because they just wanted to grab a few more customers by saying they had it.
Anticlimactic shitty ending boss fights. See Half Life 2 and Might and Magic: Dark Messiah. Also KOTOR 2, where the ending was just kind of half-assed and unsettling, leaving big plot holes, and it ends like "...that's it?"
On the other hand, dragging it out too long into extra innings. (See; Chrono Trigger, when you fight Lavos, go inside and fight smaller less-cool lavos, then inside of that is smaller less-cool Lavos.)
Games that have a mandatory annoying thing explaining stuff to you that you can't shut off.
Big, beefy guns that do shitty, weak damage. Half-life is plagued with this. Unreal Tournament 2004 had you able to dual-wield assault rifles where each bullet hit like butterfly kisses from a pixie made of sunshine. Weak explosives are also a common occurrence.
Games you have to win by being lucky. I don't mean your D&D kind of games where there's a strong element of chance, I mean as in "If I don't know that sniper is there beforehand in that game he just picks me off."
Games with too much micromanagement.
Games that are easily and obviously broken (like figuring out in Dark Messiah that the game is in fact "Lord Kickington in the Land of Conveniently Placed Walls of Spikes"
Games that think being dark all the time is the same as being scary (Doom 3, System Shock)
Games where your enemies have really cool weapons and stuff that you can't pick up.
Female characters being dumb bimbos and the game assuming that your character (and thus you) likes that.
Drowning after like twenty seconds GORDON. What, can you not hold your breath because your stupid physicist glasses ruined your sinuses? Maybe if you actually wore the HELMET of your hazard suit it would protect you from things like WATER
On the above note, why doesn't the HAZ MAT suit Gordon wears protect him from hazardous materials? Apparently it's just there to give him a health bar against bullets (without it, apparently he'd just regenerate health like people do in Halo) and count his ammo for him (and how does he carry all his shit anyway? He doesn't have, like, a backpack. Or pockets.)
Games that make you play the same brooding teenage waste of life or the same three-day bearded late-20's early 30's honkey. Or a hot chick.
NPCs all having the exact same body type. Thank you, Team Fortress 2, you are my sunshine, my only sunshine...
Games that have a lot of equally boring weapons that all do the same crap.
Unnecessary, ridiculous jump challenges.
NPC's being able to do things like "climb", "drive", or "use gun" when I can't.
Bad stealth. There's good stealth and there's bad stealth. Good stealth allows you to have a reasonable sensible time and place when you can be hidden or silent, bad stealth is just ridiculous and/or frustrating, people noticing you when they shouldn't or not noticing you when they should.
Nonsensical, play-to-lose fights. (I can throw fifty grenades in that room, but the second I step in there the lights will go off and I'll be knocked unconscious anyway to advance the plot.) The classic example is space invaders; they will kill you, you will lose.
Being too linear. When it seems like there's no side-journeys, nothing else to explore, and you're just being lead by the nose through a narrow hallway pretending to be a big environment, but not pretending hard enough to let me escape from the boring reality.
Quests with no clues. The sort of thing where you're just assumed to know things, and them not actually telling you anywhere. A lot of times this ends up with people either using cheats or going online to look up the answer and, frankly, that sucks.
Conversely, ridiculously simple quests. "Great job flipping the switch, Gordon, I can see your MIT education is really paying for itself!"
Completely useless items
No lives, no saves, no checkpoints - anything where if you fuck up (especially somewhere where it's hard) you have to spend a long time doing it again. And again.
Environments, NPCs, and enemies being copy-pasted.
People utterly ignoring it when you shoot them, wreck their stuff, etc.
Conversely, fights where your allies will jump in the line of fire and die, losing the mission for you (see above; "allies" being hindrances)
All glass being unbreakable.
Your character being unironically nothing but a soulless healthbar carrying a collection of items killing a bunch of enemies for a reason so boring you can't pretend to care about it, with no redeeming interesting feature whatsoever, completely interchangeable with about 90% of all other games.
Everything mentioned in this thread really, oh and another thing: OTHER GAMERS. Seriously, visit gametrailers, go onto xbox live, play a competitive multiplayer game.
From "Unreal Engine makes the character models all beefy looking" to "The only reason you're good at this game is because you're hosting (while playing on a dedicated server)"
The majority of gamers seem to be the thickest kind of shit you can squeeze out.
Still love multiplayer though, only because it let's me shoot these twats in the face repeatedly.
Lack luster animation, lack of proper blending and lip sync tops my list.
yep. Can't stand it when you have to watch two people talk to each other and cringe at how horrible the facial/lip animation is. This actually happens A LOT too, which is disappointing. talk about taking you out of the game.
didn't we have this thread a few months ago?
anyway...
- porting your damn console controls 1:1 to the PC
- unskipable openings
- tons and tons of sponsor logos
- the "I swallowed a flashlight" effect: glowing nostrils and insides of mouths (ever heard of AO?)
- action sequences just for the sake of it
- 3rd person 3D games where you cannot JUMP!
- obvious good choice - obvious evil choice RPG dialogue. Ideally this is paired with some good and evil karma points. Instead of choosing the reply that makes most sense of you, you're sort of forced to chose the one which gives you points (unless you love penalties). Talk about "role" playing.
Really terrible/stale/gross hair. You know the ones I'm talking about.. where it's just one plane with crappy alpha maps. Ugh! Bugs me so much, especially when other games pull off hair so well...I'm looking at your Final Fantasy.
Bad stealth. There's good stealth and there's bad stealth. Good stealth allows you to have a reasonable sensible time and place when you can be hidden or silent, bad stealth is just ridiculous and/or frustrating, people noticing you when they shouldn't or not noticing you when they should.
Hmm, think it was Theif III or something. I basically threw a big wine barrel right into the head of a guard, then brushed up against a wall, and he went
'What was that?!'
'Probably just my mind playing tricks on me..'
I can't really say it made the game-play any worse though. But I guess that'd fall under such a category
For the thing I really hate in some games (not counting the ones who are crap to begin with), is prolly not being able to jump, and in stead they have other controls assigned to the space-bar button, which one accidentally triggers
(Assassins Creed and Baldur's Gate is an exception )
One thing I've started noticing recently is the lack of teeth/tongues in characters mouths. It started bugging me when I started to wonder about why the lip synch in some games looked weird. Then I noticed no teeth or mostly, no tongues, just dark holes. That's one third or half the animation missing.
Mmm, yes, bad animation does make me sad... especially in bigger titles.
On a less techincal note, one thing that's sure to drive me nuts is really long spaces between save points. When there is lots of battles, lots of big battles, lots of (unskippable) cutscenes. And then, when you think you can finally save, one last BIG, hard battle. Where you die. And viola!! You get to do all that again. And pray you make it to that damn save point this time.
(Yes, I'm thinking about mostly RPGs with this one)
- Bad animation, especially lip flap and muppet hands.
- Button spam and quicktime events.
- [Room -> corridor -> room] x N -> arena/boss battle.
- Chunky boots and glowy bits.
- 'Man in suit' monsters.
- Gameplay being the second least important thing.
- Story being the least important thing.
- desaturation...grey or brown != a realistic range of colors.
- Putting a letter in front of RPG does not mean its a roleplaying game with extra bits...JRPG.
- Texel resolution inconsistency...
Related to the knee-high fence...magically locked doors...you know...the flimsy wooden door that looks like it would instantly turn to dust if you just so much as look at it, but you still cannot get past until you eradicated a whole crime syndicate, got rid of corruption in the watch, catched a spy and exterminated not one, but two orc tribes...
(Also applies to any barrier that normal people could easily surmount by just turning their fat asses sideways and squeeze through...or simply stepping over it...but no, you have to go the long way around, killing twohundret bears in the process)
And already mentioned, but Grinding kills a game for me...as soon as the game stops being fun and starts being work, I can do something more productive...like real work...
Oh...and dumbing down Game Mechanics...how could anyone think that the step from Morrowind to Oblivion was a step forward?
Yeah, man. The dumbing down of games is my biggest peeve at the moment. It's like everything got shoved back into the developmental stoneage, and now big console developers get to market a new level of "maturity" despite PC games throughout the 90s already having demonstrated depth, integrity, maturity. These days there is a huge market for cool-looking, make-you-feel-cool-without-doing-anything games. In a way, it's great - explosive profitability. But it's still bothersome having to sit through years of "we're breaking the mold!!11" marketing regarding stuff that has less depth/maturity than games created over ten years ago.
Not to mention direct sequels to huge franchises that fail in comparison to their predecessors due to God knows what.
So happy about Mirror's Edge + Brink movement systems, though. Finally, a bit of play evolution...
... oh yeah. "From the makers of Gears of War" on UT3 packaging. Makes me weep. :<
- Unskipable cutscenes and intro.
- Obvious lazy uvmapping
- Inconsistent texture resolutions
- Goddamn fucking quicktime events. Worst shit EVER.
- Not being able to save when/where I fucking want to.
When a developer or publisher won't release a game that lots of people want (Star Wars Battlefront 3 or Republic Commando 2)
The fact that gamers constantly just demand more sequels that are exactly the same as previous game in new engines, can we please do something different
If you want exactly the same game you already have it, and if you want a substantially different sequel that isn't more of the same or some token features tacked on the side..I'm fine with that actually.
Agree with what most people in this thread already noted. I also really hate goddamn gears cover mechanic bullshit sneaking into every god damn game, killing gameplay dead.
Obvious planes of collision in areas where realistically your character should be able to go but they are blocked off.
Also, guards or some stupid tree branch that is all "You can't go this way, there is a storm coming." and you just know that means "*sigh* have to go pick up RandomRPGCharacter from the courtyard first before we continue...". Then the guards get distracted by something stupid and leave just in time as you show up.
Oh, and EVERY PILLAR PUSHING, BALL DROPPING PUZZLE IN FINAL FANTASY X.
I also really hate goddamn gears cover mechanic bullshit sneaking into every god damn game, killing gameplay dead.
Heck yeah.
Run up to first bit of obviously placed cover before enemies have even appeared yet (you know they will because of the obviously placed cover), snap into cover, pop out now and then, don't move until everything is dead, stand up, go to next room, run up to first bit of cover...
Plot holes and everything Doom3 did with lights.
Oh, and stupid DRM (yes, I know, it's not tied to the game itself - it ruins the whole experience for me though) and ingame ads (for DLC or cherry coke or whatever - doesn't matter).
When I saw the thread I was so fired up to post, but then after I read all the posts, I just thought (and felt relieved that I wasn't the only on) that I would say AY to all posts before and after mine.
Though my pet hate is dumbing down games because they have to work on console and its crowd ("Oh no, thats not the reason that..." "FUCK YOU! Yes it is!")
Replies
Games that have you have a lot of conversations but don't bother animating the characters' facial expressions, so you have two emotionless people blankly staring at one another and rattling off a discussion that usually has something to do with saving the town/world/galaxy
EVEN THOUGH I HAVE A ROCKET LAUNCHER!
shock, simcity, elderscrolls, etc.
Exceptions to the rare cases of good streamlining.
Unskippable cutscenes that occur immediately after a checkpoint come in a very close second.
Never-ending waves of enemies when there's little (if any) indication of what other thing you should be doing instead of clearing the area.
Then the inverse: having an NPC yell and scream at you to keep moving forward when the scripting is blatantly location-triggered rather than time-triggered, especially if the game generally encourages hunting for items and collectibles.
Vehicle sections in games that aren't about vehicular combat or racing that go on for way too long or aren't just shooting galleries.
"Oh hey, there's some awesome ideas for multiplayer modes in this game! Let's all play team deathmatch!"
Things such as long cut scenes. Those ones where talking heads go back and forth about the things that don't help me level my pokemon. Especially the ones that you have to press a button after they're done so you have to sit there spamming a button waiting for them to be done.
I prefer, for example, how HL2 would have everything go down, but you could at least still look around and move. This can easily be done very wrong like in AC2 where you have to wonder around walking slow for the first 30 minutes while everyone around you talks your head off about god-knows-what.
I have friends that love those dvd menu games, but they're just not for me.
After that, its stuff like highly destructible objects being next to invulnerable objects of far flimsier construction.
Why is it that a car explodes and shatter a brick wall but the broken wooden fence that looks like its about to fall over in a stiff breeze, takes no damage?
Or the indestructible pop can you can keep kicking around with round after round from your rocket launcher, effectively turning it into a make shift companion cube.
I understand why it is the worlds are set up like they are, but it still bugs me a little.
TL;DR
OTHER GAMERS.
Seriously, visit gametrailers, go onto xbox live, play a competitive multiplayer game.
From "Unreal Engine makes the character models all beefy looking" to "The only reason you're good at this game is because you're hosting (while playing on a dedicated server)"
The majority of gamers seem to be the thickest kind of shit you can squeeze out.
Still love multiplayer though, only because it let's me shoot these twats in the face repeatedly.
yep. Can't stand it when you have to watch two people talk to each other and cringe at how horrible the facial/lip animation is. This actually happens A LOT too, which is disappointing. talk about taking you out of the game.
anyway...
- porting your damn console controls 1:1 to the PC
- unskipable openings
- tons and tons of sponsor logos
- the "I swallowed a flashlight" effect: glowing nostrils and insides of mouths (ever heard of AO?)
- action sequences just for the sake of it
- 3rd person 3D games where you cannot JUMP!
- obvious good choice - obvious evil choice RPG dialogue. Ideally this is paired with some good and evil karma points. Instead of choosing the reply that makes most sense of you, you're sort of forced to chose the one which gives you points (unless you love penalties). Talk about "role" playing.
Hmm, think it was Theif III or something. I basically threw a big wine barrel right into the head of a guard, then brushed up against a wall, and he went
'What was that?!'
'Probably just my mind playing tricks on me..'
I can't really say it made the game-play any worse though. But I guess that'd fall under such a category
For the thing I really hate in some games (not counting the ones who are crap to begin with), is prolly not being able to jump, and in stead they have other controls assigned to the space-bar button, which one accidentally triggers
(Assassins Creed and Baldur's Gate is an exception
On a less techincal note, one thing that's sure to drive me nuts is really long spaces between save points. When there is lots of battles, lots of big battles, lots of (unskippable) cutscenes. And then, when you think you can finally save, one last BIG, hard battle. Where you die. And viola!! You get to do all that again. And pray you make it to that damn save point this time.
(Yes, I'm thinking about mostly RPGs with this one)
- Button spam and quicktime events.
- [Room -> corridor -> room] x N -> arena/boss battle.
- Chunky boots and glowy bits.
- 'Man in suit' monsters.
- Gameplay being the second least important thing.
- Story being the least important thing.
- desaturation...grey or brown != a realistic range of colors.
- Putting a letter in front of RPG does not mean its a roleplaying game with extra bits...JRPG.
- Texel resolution inconsistency...
^^
(Also applies to any barrier that normal people could easily surmount by just turning their fat asses sideways and squeeze through...or simply stepping over it...but no, you have to go the long way around, killing twohundret bears in the process)
And already mentioned, but Grinding kills a game for me...as soon as the game stops being fun and starts being work, I can do something more productive...like real work...
Oh...and dumbing down Game Mechanics...how could anyone think that the step from Morrowind to Oblivion was a step forward?
Not to mention direct sequels to huge franchises that fail in comparison to their predecessors due to God knows what.
So happy about Mirror's Edge + Brink movement systems, though. Finally, a bit of play evolution...
... oh yeah. "From the makers of Gears of War" on UT3 packaging. Makes me weep. :<
I'm sorry, when I read your post I didn't first realise the break between post and signature and thought you were giving examples of bad animation
- Obvious lazy uvmapping
- Inconsistent texture resolutions
- Goddamn fucking quicktime events. Worst shit EVER.
- Not being able to save when/where I fucking want to.
The fact that gamers constantly just demand more sequels that are exactly the same as previous game in new engines, can we please do something different
If you want exactly the same game you already have it, and if you want a substantially different sequel that isn't more of the same or some token features tacked on the side..I'm fine with that actually.
You read it right the 1st time ;D
Been years since Ive put anything new up ;(
Also, guards or some stupid tree branch that is all "You can't go this way, there is a storm coming." and you just know that means "*sigh* have to go pick up RandomRPGCharacter from the courtyard first before we continue...". Then the guards get distracted by something stupid and leave just in time as you show up.
Oh, and EVERY PILLAR PUSHING, BALL DROPPING PUZZLE IN FINAL FANTASY X.
*Making a sequel and removing all the complex features to appeal to the mass market... I'm looking at you Chris Taylor!!!
Run up to first bit of obviously placed cover before enemies have even appeared yet (you know they will because of the obviously placed cover), snap into cover, pop out now and then, don't move until everything is dead, stand up, go to next room, run up to first bit of cover...
Congrats, you've finished Mass Effect 2!
Oh yes I went there.
Example: Fallout 3
-no same console multiplayer on racing games
-online achievements.... not all of us wanna play online with 10 year olds
-bad animations
-lack of originality. dont just steal something from another game without adjusting it in some way.
-lack of character development
Oh, and stupid DRM (yes, I know, it's not tied to the game itself - it ruins the whole experience for me though) and ingame ads (for DLC or cherry coke or whatever - doesn't matter).
Though my pet hate is dumbing down games because they have to work on console and its crowd ("Oh no, thats not the reason that..." "FUCK YOU! Yes it is!")
But what annoys me the most is absymal writing in games that force their plots down your throat
and this guy
Why couldn't they just stick with Amano or Itahana?