Submitted 2 weeks ago by Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net to games@lemmy.world
What are some things that just get under your skin about games?
For me, it’s games that do not allow controller rebinding. I have neuropathy and my fingers don’t all work. If I can’t rebind buttons so that I have necessary moves (for example: parry) be on buttons I can reliably press the entire game becomes unplayable.
And on console, where I can’t refund a game after I downloaded it (fuck you Sony) then it really screws me over wasting what limited funds I have on games I just can’t play.
jfkajfADAHSVb
And then there are games that seamlessly matches your pace and animation with the NPC once you get close to them. cooms
Aah, i think it was tie-fighter, where you could lock on and press a key to match speeds with an enemy - (albeit instantaneous only).
Maybe it was there in x-wing, but i feel like it was one of the minor qol improvements in tie-fighter that made it better.
They ported it over to X-Wing in later versions. Also, play XWVM, if you haven’t already.
I think about that surprisingly often. Also how nice would that be in real life too, not just games.
I cannot fathom how Bethesda still can’t get this right. It can’t be difficult to just set NPC speed to match player speed.
it just works
It’s supposed to guarantee you can always catch up with them.
Needing to log into an online account to play a single-player game.
When a single-player game keeps pausing to tell me it can't connect to the server.
Especially when this happens in small indie games.
You were the chosen one Anakin!
Not being able to pause or save at any point.
I’m a “grown-up” these days, but I grew up with games and they’re part of my life, and I love them - but in the larger scale of things, they’re still toys. The requirements of a pet/partner/child/phone call/doorbell will always nearly always outrank them.
“We don’t let you pause because it’s a simulation and and you can’t pause real life so it means the game is more realistic” = piss off
Yeah, or you can pause the game by opening the menu, but not when you’re in dialogue, when it matters most.
Long cutscene that you’ve tried so hard to reach. Will pressing start pause the game or skip it forever?
The simulation part tbh makes little sense to me, at least if I pause by going on the menu. Unless it’s multiplayer there’s little reason for you to prevent me to pause on menu, even if your aim is to be as realistic as possible.
At the end of the day it’s still a game and if I feel overwhelmed or the need to pause for whatever reason give me the option to. The people who want absolutely 0 pause can simply not go on the menu or if you really want you can put an option to disable pause on menu IG. Or yk they could do whatever they’re simulating IRL, within reason.
One thing I love about the Nintendo Switch, you can suspend any game at any time (except online multiplayer ofc) with a single button press
Yeah, the Steam Deck is actually pretty good for this on most games.
On a computer, you can, I suppose, set up a keyboard shortcut to pause the process, but you still think “this should just be part of the game in the first place”.
During EA for Hades 2 if you paused while fighting the god of time he would say “I control time here!” And unpause the game. It was funny, but if I need to answer my door I don’t want to lose my run. Thankfully that has been changed.
Games that wont let you quit to desktop in game.
I’ve noticed this is especially bad in Japanese games for whatever reason.
PC Gaming market in Japan is treated like Second Class Gaming Citizens, sadly
Alaternatively, PUBG lets you quit to desktop from the in-game pause menu, and I’ve hit it accidentally so many times.
*flashbacks to The Forest pause menu having the exit game button in the same place as the back button*
May I introduce you to my good old friend: alt+F4 😬
in old dos games "boss key" was usually ctrl+b or ESC
I never understood the point until I grew up a bit.
Honestly this is my favorite feature of the Steam Deck and SteamOS.
Lack of accessibility options, not unlike you.
Most games are better about this now, but subtitles, difficulty options, and the ability to turn off flashing lights are critical to the point I can’t play for long, sometimes at all without them.
Thank you for saying difficulty as an accessibility feature. So many people think difficulty is something inherent to a game’s design but completely miss the fact that difficulty is subjective.
Every game should have difficulty options. No exceptions.
Granular difficulty options also help. Things like being able to make the parry timings easier or harder than that rest of the difficulty.
If your difficulty presets are turning a bunch of levers at once, letting folks make their own can be very helpful.
There’s also things that aren’t often considered difficulty, but that can definitely make a game harder for some folks.
With Witcher 3 the only way I was able to play it successfully was modding it to be able to ignore a bunch of mechanics I found tedious. Things like ignoring carry weight, turning off item durability, lengthening potion duration, having items scale to my level, and hoovering up loot. Inventory management is often exhausting for me.
It’s not an easy fix this can break a game’s economy, and I think I had separate mods to reduce the impact of that.
I completely disagree. Difficulty is not an accessibility option. They are a cheap way out of fixing more complex problems, but ultimately easier difficulty just means that you won’t have to interact with the game as much to get through it. No problem if the parrying lacks clear indications when you can just take the very weak hits from the enemies instead of learning the parry system.
But for most games, it doesn’t really impact anyone if you add a difficulty slider, so game developers just do that instead of dealing with accessibility issues in their core systems.
And then there’s the souls games. These games would become objectively worse by adding a difficulty option. When overcoming impossible odds is the core principle of the game, then adding a slider to make the odds mildly inconvenient instead of impossible will actively jeopardize that very principle!
In fact there are countless stories of people with severe disabilities who found new hope in clawing through the souls games. They let go of their learned helplessness precisely because they realized that what their playing is hard and failing over and over again is an important part of the process.
That being said, the souls games do deserve some criticism in some aspects regarding accessibility. There’s a lot in the UI and feedback department that could be done to improve accessibility without having a negative impact on the game itself.
Good games have a difficulty curve that scales, usually they just speed up level by level.
"Life is just like tetris, it just gets harder, then you die." - Mark Twain
You can't make an 'easy' mode for tetris, but you could effectively start at level minus 10 or something.
I disagree with the idea that every game should have a difficulty option. If the difficulty is there just for the sake of challenge, then difficulty options should be there because in that case it’s not all that different than setting self-imposed rules for additional difficulty. But when difficulty serves a bigger purpose I can absolutely understand keeping a level difficulty experience.
For example in ARC raiders the ARC are so dangerous that they’ve pushed people underground and going topside is this risky endeavor. But if the ARC were pushovers you get this narrative dissonance where the enemy is supposed to be so dangerous that humans can’t thrive but when you fight them they die instantly so why can’t humans thrive? ARC also pose as a balancing act to the game because if the ARC weren’t dangerous the game would just be PVP with looting. You have to take ARC seriously even if you know how to deal with them because of how easily the script can be flipped on you. ARC raiders obviously doesn’t really have difficulty options because of its multiplayer nature but it does show that difficulty can have a narrative impact and difficulty can impact how you approach the game. If the game was easier it would arguably end up as a worse experience.
And difficulty can also be used to make you feel a certain way. This is why I’ve argued against Dark Souls needing difficulty options (and to be clear, I’m talking about ONLY Dark Souls 1). There’s a reason some people call Dark Souls a cathartic experience, because that’s what the game is going for. Lordran is a world in despair. The end of an era is coming and the world has been plunged into decay. The denizens of Lordran have fallen into despair, given up and hollowed. And Dark Souls wants you to feel that. Dark Souls wants you to feel the despair and find the will to continue despite that despair, lest you become one of the hollowed people of Lordran. The game is challenging specifically to make you feel like you’re being treated unfairly, like you’re against impossible odds, like you’re supposed to fail, like there’s no point playing and just give up and never play again. Because when you eventually overcome that unfair and impossible scenario you’ve failed a dozen times all the emotional tension gets released and you achieve catharsis. If you don’t feel the failure you can’t feel the catharsis thus by making the game easier the game loses a part of what it is.
Dark Souls is not a game, Dark Souls is a piece of art. We give other art the respect to be their own thing. People accept Kafka novels are hard to read. People accept The Downward Spiral is hard to listen. People accept Requiem for a dream is hard to watch. But when Dark Souls is hard to play we complain? I say let art be art. If we want to treat games as art then every game can’t have difficulty options. Some games can, will and do use difficulty in a way that elevates their artistic vision. In my eyes denying games the tool of difficulty is to deny that games can be art.
Well I think your mom only has easy mode.
In a similar vein, games that have sounds for everything. I have to play with sounds off in games I enjoy, and some sounds are used to foreshadow dangers that I end up unaware of because I can’t deal with the sound of crickets or bees or a random humming that are always present. (Shout out to Satisfactory for the incredibly granular sound control, overwhelming at first, but once it was set up it is great.)
Remapping keys. I have function (and not always voluntary) but no feeling in part of my left hand, and an essential tremor that appears randomly. I need to disable some keys because I will find my character suddenly crouching/running/attacking or whatever at really inconvenient times, and with some games the controls are so touchy that I can’t aim or move in a straight line.
Not colorblind, but some games have some very headache inducing colour choices, I have sympathy for those who can’t see colour A font on Colour B background.
Showing a long plot-explaining intro right after start, before I have a chance to get to “options” and set the resolution, subtitles, etc. I also “love” unskippable short logo videos at start. And a few screens with only “press any button to continue”.
Unskipable splash screens are the worst.
Luckily, at least in my experience, most of those are just a .mkv that you can either rename or delete and the game will just skip it entirely. Unfortunately that can’t be done on consoles
Logins. I hate games with accounts. Just let me play.
oh, hey, you haven’t launched this game in a year
please download and install the new launcher. please login to the new launcher. your login does not work, please go to the website to reactivate your account. you must restart your system to reset the launcher login screen. please wait a full minute for the launcher to finish loading. please wait thirty seconds for us to process your login credentials. please wait fiften seconds for us to begin the process of launching the game.
I want to punch your comment.
When the only difference in difficulty is either by adding more waves of enemies, or giving bosses a bajillion hitpoints.
If I already learned all the game mechanics, and the only scaling is having to repeat them a lot more, that’s poor design.
I dont mean this as much for adjustable difficulty, like easy vs hard mode, but rather in game progression…
I’d also make that complaint about adjustable difficulty, but to speak to the game progression, I have to agree.
Games should be teaching players what they’re getting into from the very beginning. The tutorial should be “When you do everything right, this is how easy the game is. When it’s not this easy, it means you’re doing something wrong”. That “wrong” thing could be messing up a mechanic, not upgrading your character enough, or you’re trying to go to a later area too early. It’s a teaching moment.
So many games today, at “Normal” difficulty, will throw players into combat encounters where they just basically kill everything in one hit. So players in the tutorial think “This is a bit too easy, I’m going to up the difficulty to Hard”, but then they don’t realize that everything gets harder when you exit the tutorial, and then over the course of the game the difficulty keeps outpacing your progression.
As far as the difficulty slider goes, I think it’s always better when harder modes just make you easier to kill, rather than enemies being more difficult to kill. There’s often a good balance that can be struck between the two, but too many games just opt for just making enemies tankier and tankier, which ends up turning the “difficulty” slider into a “time/resources waster” slider.
Cries in shadow warrior
WHY THE HELL ARE GAMES SO LOUD ON STARTUP???
There are others but this is one I just can’t believe is a thing. It’s so fucking simple to fix. Just start the volume on the lower end and if it’s too quiet I can raise the volume or just give me a volume slider first thing on initial load before any sound is played and let me find the right levels with a test sound before playing any menu music or something.
This and full white dev/publisher logo screens. I have a pretty large HDR monitor and whenever I boot up a Bandai Namco game I’ll flashback myself if I don’t look away in time.
Isn’t this what the volume on your sound system is supposed to do? Master volume in a game should be pretty much maxed out by default and the volume on whatever you use to output the sound should be set so loud isn’t blowing your ears out.
Unless you are actually complaining about sound levels of stuff that shouldn’t be loud (like menu clicking or background music) but that’s relative sound levels of different categories in the game, not the master volume.
Nah, I get what they are saying; games are just unusually loud. I can have my sound system’s volume when streaming on my PS5 set to a decent level but when I switch to a game I have to cut the volume in half if I haven’t messed with the settings yet.
Idk why this is a thing but it is.
Reminds me of the first time I booted up Elden Ring. The title screen started up and I heard some music, but it was so quiet. I turned up the volume and then a second later thought I almost blew out the speakers on my headset.
Context for anyone who has not heard the title music for Elden Ring.
I’ve noticed more and more indie devs at least have begun to set master volume lower by default. I appreciate that.
The fact that games act like climbing doesn’t exist. You reach a path blocked by a small rock that any normally able bodied human could climb and it just pisses me off.
Like Pokémon games with a rock you could easily just walk around but noooo you gotta travel to this other town to get a special item or learn a special skill to get around this thing you could easily climb over or walk around.
It’s even worse in VR games. As much as I love Half Life Alyx, there were certain barriers that are literally just a pile of rubble or a chain link fence.
Artificial difficulty. If I can only finish a game by grinding for hours on end or after endless tedious fetch quests, I am going to be very disappointed. Like there’d better be something else real strong in the title’s favor or I’m likely to drop it altogether.
There was a time when making games more difficult by way of time investment made more sense from a design angle, but that time has long since passed. Some genres are more prone to it than others (with some niches even revolving around the idea), but imo it’s just lazy design in 9/10 cases theses days.
No quit button or hiding it in the settings menus
No ability to rebind controls
Endless, unskippable intro videos
Taking control away to have a cutscene that is all dialogue and no action that could have just as easily been something you control as you walk and listen. Especially if it’s not even an in-engine, real-time scripted thing but a pre-rendered video that doesn’t even show your actual character as you have them dressed.
FOMO and most MTX in general.
No ping/latency stats for everyone on the server
Unskippable cutscenes absolutely need to die. Even on the first playthrough - give me the info I need in a notes section or something, but do not waste my limited time on this coil with slow “exposition.”
I usually quit those when they get too grating and move on, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.
I’d say that viewing cutscenes on your first playthrough is appreciating the artistic intent that goes behind it.
Points of no return and anything else that's permanently missable. No, I am not doing a second playthrough of a 100 hour JRPG.
It really depends of the implementation for me.
I completelly understand that if you take a mission where you kill a merchant, you loose the option to purchace from them or miss their questline etc. Its a story point where your acts changed the world.
But if you miss some unique loot item from dungeon you can go trough only once, because, it was too well hidden or it was behind some convoluted puzzle that you missed, im pissed.
When rebinding the keys, the game wont let me save the changes unless everything has something assigned.
During character creation the lightning on the model is completely different what you will see in game and I end up with an ugly character (Dragon’s Dogma, Saints Row 3 remaster, etc.)
Games that refuse to let you change the difficulty once you begin a game. More broadly, single player games that worry too much about preserving some sort of honor associated with doing well and make it annoying to play. Like rougue likes that have no save and quit for fear of people save scumming.
Text scaling in game where text is plot critical.
Important for things like steamdeck, some marked "verified" should be downgraded to "playable" due to the text size and inability to scale it.
Unrealistic loot.
Like when you kill a wolf and get shotgun shells as loot.
But also more subtle stuff like enemies in a remote place that don’t carry or have any kind of food and drink with them.
And when the enemy is clearly carrying a weapon, but it’s not lootable and you get some random stuff instead.
Games you can’t pause. I love Dark Souls, but PLEASE give me a real pause button !
I’m okay with the inventory not pausing, that’s part of the game design. I’m not okay with the fact I can’t pause at all, so if my neighbour rings for their spare key when I’m fighting Kalameet I just have to die 🤷🏻♀ (true story btw)
Only having one master audio slider. Please at least give me one for music, voice, and sound effect mixing separately.
spongy bosses don’t always mean they’re challenging. I can’t count how many times I’ve fought a boss who isn’t hard or interesting but just wastes time cause they have a ton of health.
mechanics matter.
Quests that demand that the player finds X of an unimportant item in a world which has exactly X instances of said item. Thankfully most games nowadays will offer up more of said item than needed to complete the quest, so that one doesn’t end up scouring the map over and over again, in search of that elusive last bottle/scroll/pigeon, because nobody got time for that. And not even talking about optional collectathon quests for those who want that sort of thing, some games would have this sort of quest in the main storyline.
Games that don’t allow you to pause and skip cutscenes.
I don’t want to have to miss half of the cutscenes just because someone the phone rang or something half way through. Alternatively, when I’m 23rd replay of a game, I do not want to have to sit through every cutscenes I already know by heart.
No save option during stealth sequences or generally in stealth-heavy games. Allow me the option to either improvise and enjoy messing up or plan and execute and test every section of a stealth route carefully without having to replay the mission a thousand times, especially when the slightest hiccup will have the whole mission going awry. If that leads to some people save-scumming their way through the entire mission, so be it. Let them play their way.
Cutscenes that can’t be paused, especially if they’re longer than 10 seconds.
Do you have the slightest idea how frustrating it is to be mid-cutscene, something else requires my attention, and I cannot fucking pause it? Singlehandedly my biggest gripe with gaming.
Anything that needlessly makes me repeat content I already beat or similarly wastes my time. Some examples are:
Fixed save points in general.
Unskippable cutscenes between the last fixed save point and the boss fight.
No autosave or fixed save point after a boss fight.
Preventing me from backtracking after I stumbled into a cut scene and/or boss fight because it wasn’t obvious which path led to a point of no return.
Multiple un-skippable product and company credits at the start. Show a blinking “Loading…” if that is what is going on but let me skip this stuff on the second start onward.
Indepth tutorials told by dialogue boxes. Run 5 steps.
[Hey player!]
[You know some boxes can be moved right?]
[Just walk up to the box]
camera pans 3 feet to the left to show the box in the centre of the screen
[Press X to grab it]
[And when youre done press X to let go]
[Im sure youll find many uses for this during your adventure]
[Why not try it on that box over there?]
<hmmmm. Seems like im going to need to move that box if I want to get anywhere>
When you get near the box a massive X symbol flashes madly and unmissably above your head, and theres lines on the floor showing where it needs to be pushed to, which is also the only way its programmed to move, literally impossible to do wrong, and you push it like 5 feet.
[Wow! You did it! Looks like you can get to the next area now!]
<I should probably remember that, it could be useful in the future>.
You’re now free to play the game, all the way to the next room, where you’ll spend way longer than necessary learning something a fucking 4 year old could figure out, and you dont even need figured out because its been a staple of games since before you were even born.
I want to GIT GUD but I’m not the kind of person who can dodge and parry while managing a stamina bar. ER and DS games look awesome but I really can’t do much sightseeing in them. I tried Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and in all of them I hit a wall against the first miniboss who I should be learning to parry on. I’ve always leaned toward dodging taking priority before parrying and a stamina bar limits that.
I recently played through Ghost of Tsushima and parried a thousand cuts. The game doesn’t have stamina though. I understand stamina as a game mechanic but find all it adds is tedium. There’s what I believe to be some good games hiding behind a stamina bar. I can enjoy the games until the stamina bar runs out and then I’ll be thinking about enjoying a different game.
Too many games are “survival” games now which really means they will make you do a bunch of chores to get to the sub par shooter or adventure game the chores gate you from. No, I don’t want to chop wood and get rope or whatever for the 50th game that never innovates on any of these mechanics to get to the “good part”
Also lots of fun games seem to be ruined because they are battle royales.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
unpausable cutscenes. Nothing bugs me more than getting interrupted in the middle of a cutscene and not being able to press escape to pause the cutscene. You’re forced to try to split your attention between what interrupted you in the cutscene or restart and see the cutscene from the beginning again.
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
All this. Everyone focuses on not being able to skip a cutscene but not being able to pause it is even worse for me, especially when trying to pause actually does skip the cutscene.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Being able to replay a cutscene would also be nice.
altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Another one is QTE in the middle of a cutscene, ugh.
SaraTonin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
For me, it’s cutscenes in general. I know there are people who do care in general, but for me a game where I care about the plot is very rare. And the examples I can think of (Outer Wilds, or Ico, for two examples) either have no cutscenes or very few brief ones, and tell the story in a different, more immersive way.
For me, a general rule is - if the game forces moments on me when I can put the controller down and wander into a different room, then that’s not what I’m interested in. I want to actually play the game.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Rage inducing absolutely.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m up-voting as hard as I can…
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I never pause cuscenes, not because I don’t want to ever but because I’m always afraid I’ll skip it instead.
FenrirIII@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
My wife has the unique ability to always want my attention during cutscenes.