Gaming Pet Peeves

I really hate when say you have a tough fight, boss or section. You die and instead of starting you right before the fight, I have to do some mindless activity before hand. Run down a hallway. Listen to something in my (character's) earpiece perhaps. Watch a cutscene. Whatever. Blech.

Ya, and then you start getting super good at that little section. Then you try to take a shortcut and die three times in a row before you even get to the tough part. Maddening

TripOpt55 wrote:I really hate when say you have a tough fight, boss or section. You die and instead of starting you right before the fight, I have to do some mindless activity before hand. Run down a hallway. Listen to something in my (character's) earpiece perhaps. Watch a cutscene. Whatever. Blech.

Yeah, I hated listening to the same damn radio conversation over and over and over again.

Did I mention this already? But when characters you're following walk slightly slower than your default move speed. GRAH! Infuriating. You have to run, then stop, then run, then stop. JUST FIX IT.

I'm hate when you have to wiggle the stick back and forth to get out of some dazed state or something. It annoys me.

I think I broke my PS3 controller doing that RE4. I think I may have fixed it (had to roll up a piece of tape to put in between this foam pad and the circuit board - found the fix online luckily!). But yeah, that stuff is annoying and not good for the controller at all...

When an attack knocks you down, and the enemy can use it faster than you can get up. This completely ruined the first boss in The Witcher 2 for me. stuff from that game could probably fill this whole thread, though

I remember that being a problem for the first small colossus in Shadow of the Colossus too.

Krubixcube wrote:I think I broke my PS3 controller doing that RE4. I think I may have fixed it (had to roll up a piece of tape to put in between this foam pad and the circuit board - found the fix online luckily!). But yeah, that stuff is annoying and not good for the controller at all...

Track-and-field games in the 1980s like Konami's Track and Field and Activision's Decathlon used to rely entirely upon rapidly waggling the joystick to simulate the running events. I used to cheat at those by using a Trak-Ball in turbo mode. Do track-and-field games (which I imagine only come out during the Olympics these days) still do that?

I was just thinking of this one today. I hate it when games take away control to make your character do something stupid. Usually it's when there's an obvious trap ahead and it makes you walk into it. Either make that path the only option or let observant players bypass the trap somehow

Another thing is when a game presents objects that would help you but doesn't let you use them for some reason. This one's just plain stupid. Get that stuff out of the game if I can't use it.

Lone Survivor was ruined by stuff like this. There's a bit where you have to get a huge monster into an elevator and send it into the basement to get it out of the way. You have to call the elevator from the basement, and the game makes you stand there and wait as the elevator comes down for some reason. In another part, you find a shotgun but when you try to pick it up the character says "it's not my style."

Mass Effect Andromeda gave me a really awful one with crafting systems where they make it way more complex than it needs to be. There were so many gun blueprints that had five or six different elements required but I had no clue where to get them or just how much of an impact this guns upgrades would have over my old ones. Either 3 also had a steep barrier to how many different crafting items you needed to keep track of while not going into detail how the items would help you. It just made me ignore the crafting as opposed to ME2 or TLOU where they kept it simple and I had good examples of how everything would be of use.

I hate crafting. Even easy crafting. The only crafting in a game I ever liked was Final Fantasy IX, and it wasn't much of a crafting system, it was literally just putting two different weapons into a pot. Also hate when weapons break. Too. Much. Stress.

I think crafting can work, but most developers have no idea how to make it work and are just checking a box. TLOU without crafting would be a lot less interesting IMO, but that's because it has a reason to be there (encourage scavenging)

Yeah I guess the crafting in that game was so well done and felt natural that I forgot all about it.  It's mainly an RPG that I hate crafting, and that's mainly for crafting weapons.

I guess I'll add weapon breaks to this list.  First one that comes to mind is Dark Cloud.  You could be swinging away and have enough weapon hit points and suddenly the enemies would start blocking, and before you know it, the weapon you've been building up for hours is gone.  Most of the games I play don't use it often, but that doesn't mean I'm letting it off the hook.

And you seem to be up really early, I'm assuming it is 6 AM there. Does Bret want to wake up before 6?

I'm hit or miss on weapon breaks. Was fine with them in Fallout games but they had easy ways to fix them so it encouraged scavenging, which I felt is one of Fallouts highlights. Also didn't mind it in BotW because weapons were dropped all the time and it really made me consider how to manage what weapons i have and which would both be good for the fight but not too good that I wouldn't rather save it for later.
That said the way you had to equip a new now was bullshit. Melee weapons were nice and easy to manage, but you had to pause the game every time you needed a new bow

TLOU's crafting really did fit with it's world. I was about to wholeheartedly agree that crafting sucks until you reminded me. That said, I personally haven't experienced a weapon durability system that I liked.

Even in Bloodborne where it wasn't really difficult to repair your weapons it felt more like a chore than a serious consideration.

It is just a chore. When that weapon breaks and you have to decide from reloading save points or going on, that's no decision anyone should have to make.

Was playing Styx: Shards of Darkness and got a good one: Boss battles where you can still die after you beat them. Like in here, there's some exploding orbs on his stomach that you have to navigate and it's very easy to think you can run past them and get to the objective and finish the level. But nope, they'll explode no matter what with bugs chasing you, so you have to run to them, then to safety three times before you can finish the level.

Also needing to do the same thing three times without any twists to the formula.

Okay, I've got a big one: Stuff that used to be basic features behind a paywall. Cosmetic stuff is annoying enough, but I can just ignore it. On the other hand Metroid: Samus Returns' Hard Mode needing that new metroid Amiibo is really stupid. Not a Samus one you may have lying around, the one of the metroid creature. I mean, I like amiibo figures as figures to have lying around so a costume doesn't really bother me since I might want the amiibo anyways. But I love past Metroids' hard modes, but won't spend $13 on a figure I don't really want for it. That's ridiculous.

Feel free to post your worst paywall. Not sure what my last one would have been (probably Mass Effect 2's extra weapons), but this now takes the cake.

I heard about that...fucking Nintendo. They're a good company but they pull some bullshit money-grubbing schemes OFTEN. But it was usually for stupid hardware peripherals or releasing another version of the 3DS (lol). But this is going against their ethos.

Yeah for all of the bad and weird decisions they tend to make, this feels very... un-nintendo. I hope this isn't the direction they go in.

Worst paywall was holding Modern Warfare remastered hostage with the collector's edition of whatever the last CoD was. And then selling the old map packs for it as DLC. And introducing microtransactions. Pretty much everything about MW Remastered is shameful, really

This one isn't always the developers fault, but something annoying I have no real control over nonetheless: How every other game gets a controversy now. Cuphead has people yelling if reviewers should have a certain skill level to do their job. Destiny 2 had some kind of symbol people confused with the alt-right. NBA 2K18 has the worst case of microtransactions I've seen in a $60 game (look them up, they're awful). Remember when we could just enjoy these things?

Is that symbol the hand gesture thing that people suddenly started saying was a secret white supremacist thing for some reason? I still don't know if that was a joke or not

When you have to kill 1000 no-name dudes in a violent videogame but the protagonist suddenly grows a conscience when it comes to the main villain. It's just so silly. Also the treatment of normal human villains as though they are some kind of supervillain that you can't just shoot while you're hiding up there omg why are you just standing there Nathan Drake?

volvocrusher wrote:This one isn't always the developers fault, but something annoying I have no real control over nonetheless: How every other game gets a controversy now. Cuphead has people yelling if reviewers should have a certain skill level to do their job. Destiny 2 had some kind of symbol people confused with the alt-right. NBA 2K18 has the worst case of microtransactions I've seen in a $60 game (look them up, they're awful). Remember when we could just enjoy these things?

Enjoying things is for squares. Don't you know we all need to be mad about things all the time in order for them to be good?!

Even though the two Kotor games are my favorites holy shit is their checkpoint system terrible. Have to keep a strong mental note to keep saving after each encounter otherwise I can go through twelve different fights, solve three quests, and literally cure a plague killing millions, only for me to get caught off guard by a group of thugs and have to start all that over again.

Yeah, older games were brutal for things like that. Auto-save has definitely babied us as of late.