Topic: Gaming's pet peeves

What are gameplay elements, story beats or other aspects of a game that really bother you and hurt your gameplay experience. Air your frustrations here (within the limits of common decency of course!)

Also, I really couldn't remember if we ever had a topic like this. I tried some searches on the forum but nothing turned up. If such a topic already exists, well, then my apologies to our moderator.

Anyway, one of my no. 1 frustrations in games is incorrect colission detection; especially in games where it matters. It just hurts the gameplay so much if you need to imagine squares around objects so you won't get hit and, also, there's not a lot I find as immersion breaking.

The most recent example I experienced was Guacamelee. The enemies aren't even the biggest problem, as the fighting is too fast to care about that anyway, but it is a major problem while platforming. The spikes which you often need to jump over look pretty small, but they have a big box around them. I just can't handle that sort of thing, because being hit by them feels unfair... every time.

Also, this s the year 2018 (or in the case of Guacamelee 2014) we're talking about. It's not that hard to implement that stuff in a 2D game. It's pretty inexcusable I'd argue.

Another offender: Bloodborne. Enjoyed the game immensely but the detection here was never acceptable. I would often get hit through walls by enemies which I didn't even knew were there, but also just the simple situation of me missing an enemy with my blade, while still seeing its hit points go down just kinda gets me out of it. Why implement these kind of graphical details if they only hurt the gameplay?

Anyway, what bothers you while playing?

This one is probably going to sound real petty but it seriously annoys me every time so.

Okay, you know when you're in a game - third person action or whatever - and you're out of combat, just walking somewhere with someone and talking and stuff? Probably a thing where the dude is like, "Hey, follow me to the next mission and I'll do a bit of exposition..."

It properly winds me up when the walking speed of the person you're with isn't the same as your own, so you either need to start running like a weirdo or you have to stop and start constantly to keep pace.

@Kidfried Good topic!
Yeah, I never was able to understand the love for Guacamelee. I tried to like it but just found the whole game in general to be a bit frustrating and boring. And you’re right about Bloodborne. I adore it and it’s probably one of my top 5 games of this generation, but I quickly discovered the poor collision detection on the very first area after getting hit from below thinking I was safe on the staircase. The thing about Bloodborne though is that once you got a feel for the quirkiness of the collision, it becomes a tactic to use to your advantage. At least that’s the way I felt about it. It’s probably considered cheating and gaming purists may scoff at it, but I figure that if the enemies can hit me through walls and staircases, then I’ll use that against them as well. The game is difficulty enough that I had to use every possible tactic to my advantage. Commonly I would watch YouTube videos when I was having trouble on a boss and they commonly would utiluze the environment with its ability to hit through a wall or obstacle. The Shadow of Yharnam fight comes to mind. Another was the area (I forget exactly now) where you get attacked by 3 pretty high level hunters all at once, one of which would spam the bolt spell against you and it was nearly boss level of difficulty to get past that area until I found that I could run back up into the room with the lantern and slip just inside the room and to the side and the AI would chase me and just run up to the wall but not come in the room and I could just slice away at all three hunters through the wall and if I kept my distance just right I wouldn’t be hit. A similar tactic on that first frustrating bridge before the Cleric Beast boss with those annoying werewolf guys — they would get stuck in the doorway but your weapon could slice through the walls to hit them from a comfortable distance. 😁

@johncalmc I know exactly what you mean, and yes, it's very frustrating.

@johncalmc Ha, ha! Yes, that issue exists in a lot of games. A similar annoyance for me is when you are walking along with the NPC to the next specified location and are trying to actually listen to the conversation which may have important nuggets of narrative for the story and then you get to the destination too quickly and the conversation cuts off in favor of the next story event and you’re left wondering what the conclusion to the previous conversation would have been.
There’s been times I reloaded a checkpoint just so I could take the walk more slowly and hear the whole discussion 😂
@JoeBlogs Yeah, the picking up items issue is a real pain. Sometimes an enemy dies on top of a rock or box or other random piece of the environment just out of reach and you can’t get up there at the right angle to loot the body for items and that drives me nuts too.

Handholding. Bores me to tears. You arrive at the location of a crime in The Witcher, after having been told exactly where to go by a written and visual prompt. A written pop up tells you to "use Witcher sense to search the location". You press a button and certain items glow red. You walk around the room clicking on those items. Then the game tells you where to go next. Spread over 100+ hours. What's the bet Spider-Man is the same uninspired rubbish?

Someone shoot me in the face.

Compare to Zelda, where you are told to meet with someone at the point where 2 imaginary lines cross between 4 shrines (that you previously had to find and mark yourself). This actually requires you to open your map and use your brain and mark the meeting point yourself, then turn up and see if you were right. More of this stuff please devs.

@JoeBlogs that's annoying for sure, and it happened a lot in the "olden days" partly because technical limitations meant developers could give less visual/audiable clues as to what you should be doing next. Even I guess things like lower budgets might have had that effect.

These days I don't think their is much excuse other than a lack of creativity. Being completely lost because the game is not clear is one thing, but just telling you exactly where to go next is a lazy solution to this problem.

There is also an element of games becoming easier (i don't really mind this, per se) but the result of this is people are getting lazy and will say the pacing is bad if they have to think for 5 minutes.

Sorry but being stuck for 2 hours is really part of what made the old Tomb Raider games so fun and memorable, and the fear to have players stuck is part of what makes the modern ones more forgettable. But yay they added RPG-lite elements, woooo.

I hate it when ya in a team or even just a duo with AI characters and they are supremely stupid... The world famous Goldeneye issues come to immediate mind , but generally when ya have to "escort" someone and they cant get around a tree or a box and spend an extra 30 seconds taking another route, while you have to defend yaself because ya being made to wait. Or even worse, they walk into bullets or your line of sight... Left 4 dead was a prime example

@JoeBlogs That is a real bugbear. Even further, but related I suppose, are those forced animation sequences characters annoyingly find themselves stuck in - but they are simultaneously still vulnerable to enemy attacks. In Gears of War, the chainsaw was often a fun way to dispatch of enemies, but during that animation you can still be shot. I can't remember if it applies in the single player campaign, but it it was very irritating in multiplayer. A more recent example is Assassin's Creed Origins. Bayek does this automatic "finishing kill" animation on the last enemy in a group - I suppose of enemies and that are actively attacking you. This even occurs in forts, so the animation can occur on an enemy at one end, by you can still be "seen" by an enemy at the other end.

@JoeBlogs Yeah it's just that pursuit of a giant open world with hundreds of characters and linked quests is kind of lost on me if I'm just following step by step instructions as if I'm building some Ikea furniture. I've said before, Zelda is far from perfect but to me it's a significant step forward for the more important aspects of open world game design.

@JoeBlogs @johncalmc This topic is for any minor inconvenience you encounter during your adventures! Those are great.

@Th3solution I have a lot of minor complaints with Guacamelee, typical complaints I have with many indie games: just not polished enough. But that doesn't take away from the fact that I loved playing a more modern metroidvania focused on hand-to-hand combat.

Totally forgot about the game, but with Guacamelee 2 coming up, I wanted to do one more playthrough on hard for the platinum.

-Timed missions. Specifically timed missions where the clock runs even during cutscenes or any part where you have no control over your character. Usually the time is long enough to offset it but otherwise I feel like I'm being punished for something outta my control. This happened to me in Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault where I lost a dev time by a few seconds because the timer runs during cutscenes.

-When the AI reads your inputs in fighting games. This is just cheap and stupid. If you want to test me in a fighting game, make a competent CPU opponent, not a perfect play, read your button and retaliate with the perfect precision counter for it CPU.

-Game that rely too heavily on a guide/"Moon Logic". I hate it when I have to look at a guide to make any real progress. Games like the first Legend of Zelda are impossible to play without a guide. Yeah, it was hampered by technology then, but it really doesn't hold up now without one. Same goes for puzzles with dumb solutions you'd never know without a guide.

That's my big 3. There's probably more, but I'll probably think of them later.

Oh hey I forgot one- The "Hopeless Boss Fight" (Nadine in Uncharted 4, Jetstream Sam in the opening of Metal Gear Rising, Beatrix in FF9), bosses where you are set to lose no matter what. To me, these are just massive pacebreakers that waste time, especially on repeat playthroughs. The intention is to usually set up how strong they are and give a character a goal to get strong enough to put them down, and that's usually fine, but sometimes this is done badly. Sometimes you get crippled and you don't have your full strength. Sometimes they're just OP as fack until you can beat them and see how nerfed they are in comparison to when they stomped you at the start. And sometimes they're just super good, they beat you and you never fight them again. It can also cause some massive gameplay dissonance when you do stomp the person in question, but you can't progress because you're supposed to job to them. I just don't like this trope. If you want to sell me on someone being Über powerful, do it in a cutscene and have the game accurately reflect that. Don't nuke my capability to be good at a game.

@DerMeister "-When the AI reads your inputs in fighting games. This is just cheap and stupid. If you want to test me in a fighting game, make a competent CPU opponent, not a perfect play, read your button and retaliate with the perfect precision counter for it CPU."

That's kinda the only way it can work. They build in things that make it stupider otherwise it would just destroy you every time lol.

@johncalmc This. Slow allies wind me up no end. I'm looking at you, Uncharted.

@JoeBlogs Also this. Multiple pick-ups falling atop one another, causing me to look like a fool as I'm picking up, putting down, picking back up and putting back down various weapons or items. As you say, even worse in the middle of combat. Again, I'm looking at you, Uncharted.

Thanks for this topic, @Kidfried (great idea!). Oddly enough, I've just gotten really frustrated at a boss fight in Shadow the Hedgehog on PS2 and I was looking for somewhere to vent about it, so this place'll do! It was a boss fight where you have two enemies, Sonic and a massive mech thing. You have to attack Sonic to bounce high enough to hit the mech, but the mech has a shield which is only open for a brief window. Sounds quite clever and elaborate, yes?

Yes, in theory, it should all work quite well together... except why, for goodness sake, did somebody give both of them independent attack patterns?! I made one tiny mistake after about a minute and suddenly the whole rhythm of the fight was thrown off. Sonic never went anywhere useful whenever the mech's shields were lowered, and it took a while for me to realise that I was stuck in an unbeatable loop. I had to restart. That's just cheap, and it reminded me of how much I hate games that hinge on such tiny, easily-missable elements and then just run and run and run.

I'll do story beats later. I've got a few.

Something I always hate in games is backtracking. It only serves to artificially lengthen a game. It's not fun, there's no point and its typically the worst feature in any otherwise good game.

Another is the dreaded escort mission. Admittedly this was at its worst in the PS2 generation, but having to worry about taking care of another character is often an exercise in frustration. Nowadays many games feature characters that can take care of themselves, but they still get in the way. Atreus in God of War had very smart AI and never got in the way, which was good.

Poor checkpoints. I strongly dislike redoing things in games. I admit that my skill level is not particularly high, however I have played games where you can't manually save and find yourself redoing large sections if you happen to die. It just seems overly punitive.

Anything timed that results in an automatic game over if you run out of time.

An inability to pause cut scenes. Sometimes life happens and you have to leave the TV for any number of reasons. I find it annoying that many games are losing pause functions at all because of online components but not being able to pause a cut scene is even more annoying.

On the flip side, ones you can't skip are just as annoying and always seem to be before a boss that will beat you numerous times before you get the better of them.

Unskippable credits.

I appreciate that a lot of folks put blood, sweat and tears into the experience I just enjoyed, but unless you make your credits sequence visually engaging or interactive in some way (Rayman Legends, Sonic Colours), nothing deflates a sense of victory more than having to let tiny white names scroll by over a black screen whilst a random piece of the soundtrack plays on a loop for seven or eight minutes.

Especially since I reach my limit around the third or fourth minute, go and make a cup of tea and, when I've come back, realise I've missed a post-credits sequence I was supposed to stick around for.

At least give us an original song (Metal Gear) or some new voice work (Batman: Arkham).

3rd person games that don't give me full control of the camera with the right stick. I have got so used to it over the years that when I don't have it I hate it...

Being forced to use any kinda gatling gun or heavy weapon. This is done in pretty much every shooter and I'm so over it.

Boss fights where the boss has 100 little minions helping him. This has also been done to death in games.

@RogerRoger Very true. Best post game
credits ever = NieR Automata.