Pet Peeves of Gaming or DAMN YOU GAME DEVS!

[Kyanbu The Legend]

So I thought this would be a pretty neat thing to discuss. And I'm sure we can learn quite a bit from it too.

What are your gaming pet pevees?

What are the things you really hate to deal with in game? The design choices devs make that ticks you off or is otherwise hard to deal with in-game?

For me it's bottomless pits. In some cases they're fine but I can't really stand when they are spammed all over the place, in areas where they really don't belong. Sonic Advance 2 and 3, Sonic Rush (Rush Adventure though not as much as part 1), Sonic Unleashed, and Sonic Adventure 2 are pretty big offenders of this. Largely due to these titles being focused on speed, something that does not mix well with surprise bottomless pits.

[Ryong]

Sonic Advance's game design became bottomless pit spam after a while, yeah, always ticked me off.

I always get annoyed at any platforming game that suddenly decides that doing 20 tiny jumps to climb some stairs is a good idea.

I'm also not a fan of gigantic combos in fighting games simply because if you screw up an attack and the other dude starts comboing you you have nothing you can do.

[phil_]

I'm not a big fan of games where equipment's main function is to make the numbers bigger, or where there are so many different numbers that making the numbers bigger might be a bad plan because it makes other numbers not as much bigger, or where they hide the numbers but knowing the numbers are absolutely necessary for advancing through the game.

In short, I dress my video dollies in what looks good and hope for the best. I know it's me, not the game, and hope I can be forgiven for not giving Lunar more of a chance.

Edit: While Lunar's on my mind, I don't care for "girl as reward" in games. I know Mario did it, but Mario is its own reward.

[RobinStarwing]

Seemingly normal-looking everyday chests that you can't open or you will not get a weapon in a game and you need a guide to know WHICH FUCKING ONES!!!!!!!!!! YEAH I AM TALKING TO YOU SQUEENIX!!!!! ALSO GIVING US A WHINY-ASS EMO BITCH WITH A LAUGH ONLY BEAT IN ANNOYANCE BY THE DUCKHUNT DOG!!!

In other words, hard to get powerful weapons without at least something noticeable.

And badly-designed character personalities. (Seriously, Yuna in both X and X-2 was more fun.)

[Jagos]

I find it funny that more people liked Tidus as a main but if you so much as show that Cloud grew before Square retconned him everyone gets hit by the nostalgia bug and forgets he got better by the end.

My main pet peeve is the one where I jump through a thousand and one hoops for a prize...

Then find something better right around the corner...
That's usually when you know the devs just said "yeah screw this, they already paid us."

@#%&!

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Jagos's is right. Cloud gets over himself as soon as you get him back early in FF7 Disc2.

Unfortunately Advent Children happened and old Cloud's never been the same since. With KH1 and 2 making it oh so much worse for the poor guy's rep.

Which leads to my next pet pevee. I really hate it when devs decide to put the fan's opinions over common sense. Especially when it's trying to catter to fan boys and girls. Another Sonic example, Shadow the hedgehog while an okay game at best, only happened because Sega asked if the fans wanted it and they said yes. Heroes happened because fans wanted good old light hearted Sonic back.

And an FF example would be FF7's many games and it's characters sometimes getting flanderized a bit here and there (like Cloud going from developed character back to emo in Dissidia FF to an extent, KH1, and KH2).

Listening to your fans is a good thing but you should still know a bad idea when you see one. Not all of the fans are right you know.

[RobinStarwing]

How about stupid AI? I don't mind when it's the enemy that shows it but Harvesters in Command and Conquer have this HUGE habit of going into the enemy base when it is shortest way back to the Refinery. Also, FF XII Revenant Wings comes to mind.

Also, I hate Tidus and Cloud equally but my major FF Char-rage is on the Mommy Issues Small-Dicked Big Sword carrying-freak Sephiroth. Talk about what they did to him! O_O

Oh and yeah...game economies and escort missions.

[Arcanum]

Grinding is the worst thing in existence. MMOs, JRPGs, whatever. I should be the appropriate level for the next set of content just by playing and enjoying the game, not by killing monsters that have nothing to do with anything, or getting 10 orc bones for farmer McFuckwit who already has 30,000,000 orc bones lying around his house thanks to previous adventurers.

I also hate the FF games (and similar JRPGs) because in addition to the grind they're all like "hey we got this awesome story, but if you try and find out what happens next before doing all these side quests and killing some random monsters for good measure, you're going to get fuuuucked." So in other words, I don't like being baited by plot just to be stonewalled by game mechanics.

[Bells]

The thing i think it hits most people about that is that we are used to see a heroe's journey to the end. Not AFTER the end.

That goes for movies, books and games... we see characters grow and develop, and by the end of their journey (if it's a good story) the character has changed and worked on his flaws and the flaws of the world that were his obstacles...

But most of the time, we don't see what happens AFTER that.

Taking Cloud as an example, i wouldn't consider Kingdom Hearts... that can be consider an alternate reality. Nor would i consider Dissidia, cause that one has a whole time-space continuum reality going on... so you can't really precise "what" Cloud is in there...

On the other hand, we have Advent Children, and i think it's pretty fair to say that the movie does really nothing to add to any of the characters... it's just Enjoyable fan babble, really.

The same goes for Link... i don't know what happens to the Hero of time after his weekend of adventures and everything he has seen... i don't know what happens to Samus. I know Mario goes Go Karting sometimes between adventures... but that's pretty much it.

As for game pet peeves, the first one that pops to mind is Fake Freedom. Skyrim is a HUGE offender in this... that's when the game teases you constantly with freedom and choices, but once you look a bit beyond the surface, you see it's all smoke and mirrors. Mass Effect does that also... less in 2, but a lot in 1 and 3.

[Aerozord]

No one has mentioned escort missions? I can count all the good examples of good escort missions on one hand. The bad ones I have trouble counting thanks to blocking those things from memory.

Also another I was talking about just earlier

Ok game devs, when you are playtesting and no one can figure out what to do, that does not mean you need to give insultingly obvious indicators to us. It means you designed that part poorly and need to fix it. I dont need to be told what the freakin left analog stick does, and I certainly dont need a forced tutorial of it WHERE I HAVE TO DEMONSTRATE KNOWING HOW TO MOVE!!!!!!

[mauve]

Plot elements that go absolutely nowhere. The story will set up a character or a weapon/object to make you expect some kind of grand revelation in the plot, and then when you work your ass off trying to get to the point where the "great secret" should be revealed, it turns out to just be just underwhelmingly boring crap. ("What's that? A member of your party has some sort of connection to the main villain but doesn't want to talk about it? This theme repeats itself several times across the plot? Oh man, there must be some seriously heavy plot stuff there.....wait, wait, no, he just apparently met the villain once and kinda dislikes him cuz he's evil. No major conflict, no moral quandaries, no reason to care? No? Okay. That's cool. I'll just go back to not giving a damn about any of my party now.")


Puzzles or extra missions that need you to use abilities or controls that are NEVER EXPLAINED OR UTILIZED ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE GAME. I'm looking at you, Riddler Trophies in Batman: Arkham City. (What? I never told you that zooming in on individual explosive gels makes it so you can set them off one at a time instead of all at once like every other time in the game? Coulda sworn I did...might've been for like ten seconds while you were too busy ignoring the special combo instructions that never leave your HUD until you do it correctly sixty times. Oh well.)

Random logic puzzles that show up suddenly in games that don't seem to need them. You're running from zombies/demons/monsters/armed thugs? Welp, you're gonna have to stop to solve this Rubix cube/make a pattern out of matchsticks/ answer this random npc's stupid riddle/"hack" this "security console" with this convenient GUI program that looks like an 8-bit target shooting game before you can get through this door! Not to say the occasional puzzle is a bad thing, but if it doesn't fit the tone or style of the game, or if there are too many, it bothers me.

[Toast]

Gear appearance and stats that are tied together, especially in ways that don't allow for customization.

Grind.

An overemphasis/reliance on progression. Be it character progression or unlocks of cosmetic customization. I don't want to reach the peak of my character's power (or their looks for that matter) five minutes before the game ends. I want to reach that point with more than half of the story to go, so that my own skill plays as large a role as my build/gear/etc.

Poor ai. Harder difficulty levels that are supposedly more challenging but end up just being more tedious because the enemies' stats are boosted through the roof.

Prequels. Although this applies more to movies/books than games.

[Aerozord]

Acheivements/challenges/whatever based around failing something. Should never get a reward for losing 5 times in a row or being killed by a particular enemy

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Hand holding. If a player makes a poor choice/gamble let them live with the consequences. Chief irritation is excessive 'waypoints' and their ilk. I can understand not wanting to have to retrace steps after a while, but there's a defined lack of permanence (for lack of a better term).

That's why i like xcom so much. Any decision financially, tactically, or whatever carries an inherent risk of great gains or setbacks of varying degree. I want my choice to be my choice and live with it. If i lose half my team to a gambit i dont want to be nannied with 'aww well, here's your squad back and a cookie achievement for trying. Go ahead and try it again as many times as you want until you get the result we want you to have'

Taking away the weight of choice and consequences with too many safety nets and fallbacks diminishes the very point of even offering choices to begin with. That's what gets my goat.

[Amake]

Basically, Blizzard's entire design philosophy of bending over backwards to ensure no player experiences any momentary discomfort whatsoever. Every game of theirs I've tried in the last three or four years have unfolded a lot like that disease that makes you orgasm over 300 times a day. Sounds exciting at first, but it's exhausting, it kills brain cells and there's a challenge that should be there somewhere that just isn't, so you feel like you don't earn anything the game gives you.

[Revising Ocelot]

Acheivements/challenges/whatever based around failing something. Should never get a reward for losing 5 times in a row or being killed by a particular enemy

Come on, you can hardly dislike this. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5inGkaz3w4)

[Aerozord]

Come on, you can hardly dislike this. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5inGkaz3w4)

funny as it is, that actually hits another peeve which I mentioned earlier. Sometimes Valve has this annoying habit of literally handing you solutions. Its a puzzle game DONT TELL ME THE SOLUTION:argh:

[EVILNess]

About the only thing that gets on my nerves is overly long tutorials or holding major features of a game back until you are a dozen hours in.

I think the biggest offender in recent memory was FF12.

[A Zarkin' Frood]

I hate when games try to excuse lackluster gameplay with tons of scripted parts and a maybe a good story. Those will be games I'd rather not buy ever. And instead watch an LP of.

Speaking of. I loathe"cinematic" games that choose camera angles for style rather than gameplay and try to be a shitty summer blockbuster.

Oh and I also hate whenever a game lets you push a button to perform some super flashy move or starts a little cutscene (that will break first person view if it's a first person game) that shows you doing cool shit. Fuck that.

Oh, I absolutely hate when first person games regularly go to third person for various reasons. Fuck. That. Shit.

[Aerozord]

Oh and I also hate whenever a game lets you push a button to perform some super flashy move or starts a little cutscene (that will break first person view if it's a first person game) that shows you doing cool shit. Fuck that.

unless it was Fallout 3/New Vegas VATS kills. since worst case you can just shut them off.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Oh yeah, another one:

Making a steaming pile of mediocre shit and horrendously overpricing it. I'm looking at you Dishonored

[Loyal]

My pet peeve is obnoxiously long cutscenes. Also, cutscenes that cannot be skipped even if you've gone through them at least once before.

I also have a problem with platformer game "puzzles" that can be described as "take a leap of faith down one of several branching paths to locate the key to the next area, and start over (or worse, die in a spike bed) if you choose wrong at any point".

Finally, any "physics" puzzle games, that boil down to trial-and-error until you find exactly the right angle to jump/launch/whatever your implements at, can go fuck right off.

About the only thing that gets on my nerves is overly long tutorials or holding major features of a game back until you are a dozen hours in.

I think the biggest offender in recent memory was FF12. How does it compare to Fire Emblem (the first one released in the US), where literally a third of the story was tutorial?

unless it was Fallout 3/New Vegas VATS kills. since worst case you can just shut them off.

I made a character with a ridiculous pink beard in New Vegas. Every time he VATS killed someone and the camera randomly decided to zoom in on his be-pinked, stony face was just the highlight of my day.