Topic: Gaming's pet peeves

Making some things only reachable if you traverse the one specific way the developers programmed in the game even if you could easily travel up another way, but the game says no. Modern open world design unfortunately, and while it creeped up some in Horizon Forbidden West, I was able to move past it and still adore the game because most of the rest of it was so good.

This issue has cropped up again in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, where I could easily jump with Cloud or my chocobo to climb, only for the game to say no. I had been loving Rebirth and even didn't mind the checklist style side content when you could just go around and easily check each thing off the list, but now in the latter chapters if you don't use your chocobo's specific power for that area, then good luck reaching some of the things involved in the side content.

I'm only doing what I can reach without "jumping through hoops" now in hopes of getting back into a groove with the game. Obviously everything other than the side content is still great as expected if you loved Remake.

@FuriousMachine Yes, the respawn after death in the From / Soulsborne games is back at the lamp / bonfire, which is sometimes quite far and through treacherous pathways to get back to your bloodstain to recoup your XP. Of course, if you die before getting back, then you lose that progress permanently.

In my experience the PvP is not very intrusive. During my playthrough of Bloodborne I think I was invaded maybe twice. And that was back when it was much more popular. You can always opt to play offline too. You won’t see the messages and shadow ghosts left behind of other players, but you also won’t get invaders. In the From games I’ve played there’s select areas that are more known as PvP spots, and so that can limit your exposure as well. But I think you needn’t worry at this point about PvP being much of an issue in Bloodborne. That might change if they ever do a PS5 patch or a remaster which will spike the player numbers again.

Open World games where the world does not function as anything even closely resembling an actual world 😡😓😤 waste of time, resources and budget.

If the city or environment in your world doesn't function as a city or environment in any way, then it is not really an open world game, it is a game in a large empty area filled with crap to collect for no reason to make it seem like it might be an open world with living inhabitants.

Just ban games like that altogether or make them be better for the sake of gaming.

The amount of time devs spend on crafting their worlds and then not making them function as worlds that you exist in is just stupid and a waste of time. There must be hundreds of murals in Marvels NYC that insomniac created, but so what? You barely ever see them as there is no reason to exist at street level or do anything within the city outside of the storyline.

Skyrim is an open world.
The Witcher 3 is an open world.
GTA is an open world.
KCD is an open world.
Red Dead Redemtion is a f***ing open world.

Spider-Man... is a game in an empty city sandbox that barley even functions as a city, or a sandbox, and gives you no reason to treat it as a city. And for some reason digital artists have spent hundreds of hours putting fine details into it and they get shoved into the city and do not have any f***ing importance to the immersion or game function at all. It is literally like they have been told to copy GTA on a design front, but not in any other way at all that makes the game actually function as an open world so you don't see any of the details anyway.

Arguments can be made on both sides for games like AC Oriddysylhalla. Where there are moments when you can be immersed in the world as a world, and the deep history is a character in itself that heavily plays into the world the created feeling more alive and immersive, but it is still filled with silly game sh** that doesn't really serve a purpose. But still, rowing down an English river feels like rowing down an English river, climbing a pyramid does give a sense of awe and scale that you are somewhere and have somewhere to go, and those things go a long way to making the game worlds feel like real places that you exist in while playing the games.

I honestly think Insomniac should have realised this after the first Spider-Man, and gone all in on the game being in a city (yes, set it in the city, that is fine) but with no down time to do boring repetitive sh**, instead the only use for the city should be for travelling to quests that actually matter, and there should be 4x as many of those to make up for the emptiness. They could also have realised that if they are going to focus so much on the design of the city at street level, that they could offer some actual reasons to explore it at street level within more slow paced quests that require thought, investigation and no reliance on super powers.

Be better at designing open world games with more to do in the worlds. Or... don't make open world games. Make laser focused story driven games without worthless downtime that may or may not exist in something that appears to be an open setting, but definitely doesn't rely on padding with fluff if it does happen to have the appearance of an open setting.

There are of course others guilty of doing this "look at me, I'm an open world" statement, but then not providing anything close to an open world experience in the game itself.

As an open world game the Spider-Man series must be about a 3/10, but as story focused action games maybe 8 or 9/10s. And that winds me up so much because they don't do enough of what they do well, and they do too much of what they do terribly haha. Less collectibles, more enemy types. Less "crimes being committed" and more "someone genuinely needs your help in a human way that requires emotional maturity and bravery beyond super powers". Less "travel here to pick up an upgrade part twelve more times" more "travel here because the side quest you are on is multi facetted and you want to go and do more of it because it respects your time and will lead to nice revelations and include more cinematic cutscenes and rewarding outcomes"

Vent over 😤😤😤😅😅😅

@Th3solution Right, fingers crossed for a "non-invasive" Bloodborne experience when the time comes to try it out, then. Hopefully I'll have enough fun with it to withstand repeating the same thing a couple of times to stick with it for a bit

Like what a couple have said in the thread, timed missions where you have to accomplish a certain thing within a time frame are probably the worst things ever. I know they are sometimes placed there to give some people a challenge, but can the developers, like, not do that? It’s especially annoying when it’s done more than once in a game.

I played an obscure Xbox game yesterday called Grabbed by the Ghoulies (cause why not) and it’s FULL of these stupid challenges. There was this one where I had to find and defeat a specific enemy type hiding inside a haunted coat, but there were multiple coats placed around the room that also held different enemies inside, and I had to figure out which coat had the right enemies while doing it within a time frame of I think a minute to thirty seconds and it ticked me off so much…there are these abilities in the room that do extend the time limit, but sometimes using them didn’t help. The game probably has the worst challenges ever in my opinion and the most repetitive gameplay, and I’m not going to replay it once I finish it. It’s goofy and I like the tone of the game, but it’s infuriating with its design. The same developer behind that game shoved a ton of timed challenges in Banjo-Tooie as well, but compared to Grabbed by the Ghoulies, I actually liked Tooie, but I don’t think I’ll play it again because of how many timed missions they put it in. They were both hard and infuriating.

Escort missions might count for me, though I haven’t played enough games with them and I don’t really think they anger me that much for that reason, but I can remember Conker’s Bad Fur Day having two of them in the game. They weren’t really bad since the individuals you escort cannot die and there are no consequences or rules in place during the escorting, but they progressed slowly, especially the first one where you have to escort a baby dinosaur; I know the dino was supposed to be a baby, but it got sorta annoying when the AI controlling the dino got constantly distracted and stopped moving multiple times to hit and eat cavemen. The second one was not so bad, but I feel that the escort missions shouldn’t have been there because of how slow they are.

I should still say that I still like the Banjo-Kazooie games and Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but they have some small things that sorta annoy me.

I don’t like dying in video games. It’s scary and I feel like a little piece of me dies as well.

Eduard Brenton