Gaming pet peeves

[cordelionreaver]

Skill check mini games in RPGs really annoy me. The lockpicking/hacking mini games of Fallout 3/New Vegas/4/Skyrim, the hacking mini games of Mass Effect 2, and so on. If I have a high enough skill just let my character do it, don’t make me play some bullshit every time.

Oh yeah, and I think voiced protagonists are almost always a bad thing, in any genre of video game.

I like how the original Deus Ex handled hacking and lockpicking. The higher your skill the less tools you need to hack or lockpick.

 

[Norzan]

I don't remember that, maybe you can claim not to remember? Can't recall now.

I know Risewild said in the RPGCodex forum that you can deny that you had an hand on the events of the Divide.

I think the entire point of this is to make Ulysses seem like he's an unreliable narrator.

 

[Risewild]

I know Risewild said in the RPGCodex forum that you can deny that you had an hand on the events of the Divide.

I think the entire point of this is to make Ulysses seem like he's an unreliable narrator.

Here's what the courier can tell Ulysses:

Whatever you believe happened, you have it wrong.

You're still making assumptions about all this.

This package... I don't recall it.

You can't be sure it was me.

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

I love the idea that Ulysses has the courier confused with someone else

 

[Risewild]

I didn't have time to write some of my gaming pet peeves before. So here's a few:

• Games that have DOF and/or Motion Blur, but don't have the option to disable them.
• Games with slow character animations/combat/whatever without options to speed them up.
• Games with automatic text scrolling without having the options to pause it, don't have a backlog, or any other way of reading it if you missed it the first time.
• Games with scripted parts where the character is automatically defeated, no matter how strong the character is.
• Games that introduce new characters in a "badass" way. Like those that appear and single-handedly defeat strong enemies that the PC was having trouble with or lost to. But then these characters become playable and they are weaker, or as strong as the PC (if we're lucky).

 

[zegh8578]

• Games that introduce new characters in a "badass" way. Like those that appear and single-handedly defeat strong enemies that the PC was having trouble with or lost to. But then these characters become playable and they are weaker, or as strong as the PC (if we're lucky).

Specific example?

Reminds me of another pet peeve, which is obviously cringey failed badassyness - which adds to the cringe, because it reflects on the lack of awareness in the writers - looking FIRMLY at "Shank" in FO4's Nuka Land DLC. I hate everything about him, I hate him more than Preston, I really do - more than Preston! His idiotic writing reeeeeks of nerd-boys wet dream of superficial toughness.

Related to that I also hate that raspy tough-guy voice in voiced characters, Cyberpunk, Witcher, I'm sorry - love the games, hate the voice (although Polish Witcher voice is good, PRECISELY because it's not stupid tough-guy raspy)

And speaking of voices!
Another serious pet peeve is silly/exaggerated/caricaturized voices. It was one of my first immediate sighs of relief, in fact, when playing FONV after FO3 - characters had normal voice tones, normal voices. The exaggerated cartoony voices came right back again in FO4, because of course they did.

 

[Risewild]

Specific example?

I can't remember any from the top of my head.
But I do remember rolling my eyes when it happened in the past. I have this feeling that this happened in some jRPGs I played, but I have no idea which ones, since I haven't played jRPGs in more than a decade, and before that I played a lot of them.

Maybe some Final Fantasy or Suikoden games. I played those a lot in the past.

 

[Norzan]

I have this feeling that this happened in some jRPGs I played

It has definitely happened in JRPGs, but i can't recall specific examples. There's another variant of this with you fighting villains that are super strong during their boss battles, but when they join you they get basically nerfed to the levels of your characters.

I know it would break balance for them to keep their stats from the boss battles, but they get nerfed way too much instead.

 

[R.Graves]

Trailing missions where they have you follow a character who will go on to move as slowly as the physics of the game engine will allow them to.

Stealth sections in games that arent stealth games. The only time in history I remember this working is in the game sequel to Ang Lee's hulk movie. Most games make it way to easy so as to avoid alienating people who dont like stealth games. But, as a result people who do like stealth games become alienated and including the section becomes a move that serves no one. In mary Jane's stealth sections in spiderman ps4 you can literally run through the level and you just dance all over the shitty ai.

 

[Risewild]

Trailing missions where they have you follow a character who will go on to move as slowly as the physics of the game engine will allow them to.

Stealth sections in games that arent stealth games. The only time in history I remember this working is in the game sequel to Ang Lee's hulk movie. Most games make it way to easy to avoid alienating people who dont like stealth games. As a result people who do like stealth games become alienated and including the section becomes a move that serves no one. In mary Jane's stealth section in spiderman ps4 you can literally run through the level and dance on the shitty ai.

I also hate stealth sections in games that aren't stealth games.

Same goes for any section from a genre put into a game of a different genre. For example:

• Platforming in games that are not platformers
• Stupid QTEs in games that shouldn't have them (like modern wrestling games) or that aren't QTE games (Telltale "games" are QTE games for example)
  
• Weird puzzles that mechanically don't match with anything else in the game, but are necessary to progress the story
• Weird combat mechanics that are only used once or twice in a game, that have nothing to do with the the rest of that game's combat. Trails of Cold Steel jRPG did this with the last boss battle, which was the first Mecha battle in the game. It turned the combat into a Rock-Paper-Scissor style that was different from the rest of the battles we had done in the entire game.

There's probably more I can't remember.

Here's some more pet peeves of mine:

• Games that throw your characters' builds out of the window in some parts. I mentioned Trails of Cold Steel just now, those Mecha battles at the end of the game don't really care about what build your character has, because then it's all about the Mecha your character's in (and you can't even choose a Mecha, you have to play with the one the game gives you)
  
• Bosses/enemies that require weird stuff to defeat. This one is a mixture of two of my pet peeves, the stuff from a genre that shouldn't be in a different genre and weird combat mechanics that are different from the rest of combat in that game
• Escort missions. Doesn't matter if it's in a shooter, a RPG, a strategy game, an action adventure game, etc. Escort missions usually suck and are more frustrating than fun. On one hand, you can have then be too easy and pretty much ignore whatever you're defending (which makes it have no point in being an escort mission). On the other hand, you can have it be really hard, usually because of the AI or how weak whatever you're defending is, or because of the enemy AI that aggros the target, leaving you with little chance of defending it. Even if you hit the ideal difficulty (hard-ish but fair), those escort missions usually are just a waste of time
• RPGs that force you to have to invest in particular skills to be able to progress or get the best stuff. Underrail does this, it forces the player to have to invest in the craft skills to be able to craft the best stuff, since those aren't sold in vendors and can't be found in loot either
• Dialogue options that don't really tell us what the character will say, or that are misleading and makes us think our character will say something and then they say something way different. Fallout 4 is a great example of this
• Choice and Consequence games that are missing obvious choices. One example of this was in Pathfinder: Kingmaker:
  Spoiler

  We have a bard companion named Linzi. After you have your "kingdom", she'll steal a large sum of capital funds to buy a printing press. It doesn't matter if our character (the ruler) is lawful, chaotic, neutral, good or evil, you don't have a choice to arrest her or execute her or anything else besides forgiving her
• Games that don't let you map your keys or change your control settings
• Certain PC games that don't let you play without a controller, even though they are perfect for Mouse and Keyboard. This is usually seen on "lazy" ports of console games
  
• Games without sound options
• Games with a lot of speech/cut scenes, etc. but without options to enable subtitles for those parts

 

[R.Graves]

Platforming in games that are not platformers

I've always been a hardcore proponent for the souslborne "gimmick" bosses because they provide new and cool experiences that arent just "smack it the ass until it dies" but I think the bed of chaos fight is the pinnacle example of why this is almost always a bad idea.

 

[SquidWard]

I didn't have time to write some of my gaming pet peeves before. So here's a few:

• Games that have DOF and/or Motion Blur, but don't have the option to disable them.
• Games with slow character animations/combat/whatever without options to speed them up.
• Games with automatic text scrolling without having the options to pause it, don't have a backlog, or any other way of reading it if you missed it the first time.
• Games with scripted parts where the character is automatically defeated, no matter how strong the character is.
• Games that introduce new characters in a "badass" way. Like those that appear and single-handedly defeat strong enemies that the PC was having trouble with or lost to. But then these characters become playable and they are weaker, or as strong as the PC (if we're lucky).

These are all ones I have but wouldn’t have thought of for this thread. Last one is definitely prevalent in JRPGs more than other places.

I've always been a hardcore proponent for the souslborne "gimmick" bosses because they provide new and cool experiences that arent just "smack it the ass until it dies" but I think the bed of chaos fight is the pinnacle example of why this is almost always a bad idea.

Agreed that I like it too though it kinda loses more value on subsequent playthroughs. Bed of Chaos also gives gimmicky bosses a bad name and so does Dragon God

 

[Big No]

I didn't have time to write some of my gaming pet peeves before. So here's a few:

• Games that have DOF and/or Motion Blur, but don't have the option to disable them.

Motion blur is only good for racing games in my opinion. I've played Need for Speed Payback which has either very little motion blur or none at all. Let me tell you, going 170MPH in that game feels like a Sunday drive with how boring it is.

 

[R.Graves]

Agreed that I like it too though it kinda loses more value on subsequent playthroughs. Bed of Chaos also gives gimmicky bosses a bad name and so does Dragon God

Meh everything loses value on subsequent playthroughs. The benefits of the surprise and intrigue it adds to the first time through greatly outweigh the hypothetical scenario where I want to play the same game 35 times.

 

[zegh8578]

Motion blur is only good for racing games in my opinion. I've played Need for Speed Payback which has either very little motion blur or none at all. Let me tell you, going 170MPH in that game feels like a Sunday drive with how boring it is.

What is the benefit of motion blur anyway? I always turn it off wherever it appears.

 

[R.Graves]

What is the benefit of motion blur anyway? I always turn it off wherever it appears.

It's a really useful effect if you want to communicate speed to the player. It also used to be really useful for hiding frame dips but that's not super relevant nowadays. Outside of that it's really useful if you just wanna make your game look worse.

 

[bro.nada]

I hate when there's no difference in response to dialogue options. What's the point of making dialogue trees if you're gonna copy paste the same responses to give me the illusion of choice?

Another big one is multiple weapons in RPGs. Don't really see the point other than perpetuating the gameplay loop of get money, buy stronger wep, get exp to get money easier. Upgrading the character makes sense, but upgrading the weapons with better stat versions seems like a waste.

 

[zegh8578]

Upgrading the character makes sense, but upgrading the weapons with better stat versions seems like a waste.

Idunno, I get a cheap little satisfaction from mindlessly swapping a weapon with a number stat for one with a better number stat. Green numbers or up-arrows make me happy, it's very primal.
I've thought of it often, rationally, often missing the feeling of having that one gun that is your gun, but then I see a green up-arrow

 

[SquidWard]

Meh everything loses value on subsequent playthroughs. The benefits of the surprise and intrigue it adds to the first time through greatly outweigh the hypothetical scenario where I want to play the same game 35 times.

I definitely agree as I don't really replay shit back to back often. But it is a factor still. I'd rather my first time through be more interesting and then predictable later rather than the same challenge but slightly different. Or if you're doing NG+, it's usually same challenge just more health to tear through.

 

[Norzan]

Idunno, I get a cheap little satisfaction from mindlessly swapping a weapon with a number stat for one with a better number stat. Green numbers or up-arrows make me happy, it's very primal.
I've thought of it often, rationally, often missing the feeling of having that one gun that is your gun, but then I see a green up-arrow

Yeah, it's the main drive of a game with random loot, seeing numbers go up when you get better gear.

About motion blur, i don't have an issue with it in racing games (it was already pointed above why it works in racing games), but it's disgusting in every other game genre. It genuinely gives me an headache outside of racing games.