Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I’m in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that’s something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
When games have a designated button to show interactive elements in the environment
This just screams “we don’t know how to make an uncluttered game”
Combat system that is advertised as skill based but you find out it’s actually damage based and randomized.
Doing really well and winning the impossible mission because you spent time and effort leveling up and honing your skill to defeat a boss or level that you know is going to be difficult. Only for you to fail the mission and get reset or perma death because the plot demanded it.
No controller support on PC
Mobile games with fake game play advertising and demos. In game banner ads or forced ads.
Mine is similar to yours in that it’s when I come back to a game after a while. My problem is that the difficulty of the game has increased in line with where I am but I’ve forgotten the moves.
I have the same issue with any of those long games that I’ve stepped away from for a while. I usually go back in, wander around aimlessly, accidentally mess up what I was working on before, and then realize why I quit playing it way back when.
Getting lost. I like exploring until I’m done exploring, and then I have a low tolerance for wandering aimlessly. I don’t need an indicator and a map to tell me where to go, but I appreciate a sign post or NPC to nudge me in the right direction if I need it. Sometimes level/world design does not help in areas that look samey, so landmarks or some sort of unique feature are appreciated.
I wish more games did better sign posting too. I’m not a fan of following the dotted line, but I see too many games where there’s no other way to do it. The NPC tells you to go somewhere, and doesn’t actually give you directions.
I started keeping a Note on my phone titled Game Diary with different sections for games I’m playing, and write down what I was doing, my train of thought and what I wanted to do next, things I had to check on our fix etc, at the time I put it down. It’s helped immensely when I come back to something after a while and encounter exactly what you’re talking about.
Soloable games that are balanced for multiplayer. It almost always means that basic tasks take ten to a hundred times the resources they should, and arbitrary timers are added to crafting and upgrading to slow down progression.
It’s the bane of survival crafting games especially.
Menu -> Exit Game -> Yes
Scroll Down - > Exit Game -> Yes
Scroll Down -> Exit to Desktop -> Yes
Exit Launcher -> Yes
Jackbox is one of the worst offenders of this. Have to exit 4 times to actually exit the game.
Alt+F4 is your friend!
Or on Steam Deck, quit the game using the steam menu.
Yeah, but accidentally clicking the quit button when you meant to click options or whatever and the game just instantly dropping you at the desktop is equally as annoying. Two click exit is a good compromise. Four is way too many though.
I do appreciate the games that give you quit and quit to desktop in the same menu.
It’s rare, but putting cooldowns on basic moves.
I’ve been playing V Rising lately and it does this weird thing where dodging and blocking are equippable spells with (usually) 8-second cooldowns. In return they also get powerful side effects, but I’d rather have a normal dodge or block button I can use at will than have them relegated to yet another move I use whenever I notice the cooldown has expired.
It doesn’t help that your basic movement speed is glacial. Winning boss fights come down more to your character’s stats than actual player skill since you can only dodge a few times a minute and bosses love throwing out a half dozen AOEs every few seconds, turning them into DPS races.
This is why mages are hard mode in RPGs. You’re limited by mana in how many fireballs you can cast. The sword does more damage and costs nothing to swing even though fatigue is a real thing.
My major pet peeves with games is that features available in a game are often absent in a sequel, or revamped for no reason. Unless a game receives critical reception these days, I often buy games that have been released a year ago to increase the chance they get fixed with patches.
Example: the notorious Civilization series.
- Games should have some way to take notes in game.
- External wikis are great and I love them, but they aren’t an excuse for not explaining how your game works within your game. There needs to be good in game guides.
- All games need some way to save and quit. Looking at you, rogue likes. People have lives. That’s more important than protecting some weird form of honor by making the excuse that it’s to prevent save scumming.
Games that dont let you skip the tutorial and all cutscenes. Like I get that most people want to watch the story or read the dialogue but I dont.
Games that are to easy. Its so annoying when a good game spends way to long scaling up the difficulty and you have to play for like 10 hours before the fights stop being completely mindless. Its such a waste of time.
My last pet peeve is for sandbox games and myself. Its so annoying when I have built a thing that has a lot of intergrated parts and then I decide to do a massive redesign of some part. Then I remove the parts and dont finish building the replacement. So next time i log in im immediately hit with an entire system that doesnt work and I have try clean up my own mess.
You should play Policenauts. Its a visual novel adventure game from Hideo Kojimas early days in 1994-1996 following a private eye investigating a disappearance on a space station.
When you load a save file, the game gives you a summary screen of the events in the game that have happened so far (at least it does in the SEGA Saturn version that I played). Its the first instance I recall of this happening in video games, and I do wish it could return in more games. Its possible that other games had this before, but if there was a game that did, I dont know it or remember it.
It’s a minor pet peeve but I’ve disliked it when games have multiple weapons that share ammo, especially when the game doesn’t explicitly tell you this. Some examples of games that do this are Doom and Half-Life do this. The reason I dislike this, is mainly because of how I play shooters in general. I always try to preserve my ammo by prioritizing my weakest weapons but in games that do this, I’m actually potentially wasting ammo because I’ll either have less ammo for the other, usually more powerful, weapon(s), or I might not even get to use that better weapon because I had no idea it shared ammo with a weaker weapon.
Deus Ex Invisible War did this except EVERY weapon used the same ammo type lol
I love the way they handled this in Doom Eternal - 6 out of your 7 basic weapons are matched in pairs, so you have 4 ammo types, but very low max ammo count for all of them. Instead you can pretty easily refill your ammo every ~20 seconds (using your chainsaw on an enemy drops ammo, and your chainsaw regens one fuel every ~20 seconds).
This means you never have an incentive to use weak weapons, EXCEPT for if you’re waiting for your fuel to regen. What makes it work is that your “weak weapons” changes depending on the enemies, as every enemy has at least one weakpoint for one of your weapons.
So instead of making you play cautiously and conservatively, Eternal wants you to always use your best weapons and to aggressively push forward. This type of gameplay isn’t for everyone, but as someone who usually ends their games with almost all items because “I might need them later!”, Eternal really allowed me to just have fun with all the best stuff it has to offer.
Totally agree with this one. I just posted about Quake Brutalist Jam 3, but it still annoys me that any use of the multi-missile launcher cuts into my time with the grenade launcher, and so on.
Dead Space 3 gave me an aneurysm because they just have one resource: “aMmO”.
I don’t even mind the oft-irritating “Ammo full for Pufferfish Launcher” notification, because it’s at least a reminder I should use the Pufferfish Launcher more often.
I really don’t like when games intermix tutorial with story. Unless the story is the main attraction, I cannot get myself to care for it. And then having to click through tons of story texts to pick out the tutorial parts, that is just cumbersome.
I also have to say, though, that it really doesn’t help my immersion when the fairy, that just told me she’s from the clan Uhgaloogah, then tells me to press the X button on my controller.
If you put in a lot of effort, you can make it credible that the controller is part of the game world and the fairy would know the buttons. But most games do not put in that effort. And then, IMHO it is a lot less immersion-breaking when the game just shows an info box, where we both know that it isn’t part of the game world.Speaking for myself, the average game got way better when the industry figured out it was better to mix the tutorial with the story. Bespoke tutorials felt like homework, and a lot of people are inclined to skip them, never figure out how the game works, and then come away with a negative opinion of the game. In general, and I’m curious to hear your perspective on this, you can make it exciting by starting the story en media res, so your character is using all of their usual verbs; then you can sidestep that immersion breaking moment by having the button prompts exist in a freeze frame thing, outside of the context of the story, that highlights the action it wants you to do. Do you prefer the bespoke tutorials that we got in the likes of 90s PC games? Do you like the way Gears of War does it, where it still keeps it contextual in the course of the story, but they very clearly give you an option to say that you know what you’re doing?
I think, you’re perhaps conflating story with gameplay here? I do think, it’s good to incorporate the tutorial into normal gameplay. So, you start playing the actual game right away and get told the controls as you need them. And sure, if it is a story-driven game, that probably means there has to be a story segment before all that to explain why you’re starting on this journey to begin with. So, I’m not saying I want the tutorial to be an entirely separate thing, like it typically was in the 90s.
I’m mainly just complaining about when it’s too intermixed, because I’d like to be able to skip all the text boxes where they’re rambling about the story. If they switch mid-sentence to explaining what you’re supposed to do and what buttons to press, then I’m likely to miss that while skipping through the story bits.
Preferably, there’s a separate info box on screen after the dialogue ends (which is a good idea for several reasons), but it could also just be highlighted, if they want it to be within the dialogue.Ah, I see. In a lot of games, tutorial, story, and gameplay are happening all at once. Do you have an example offender that was on your mind originally?
I think, this was on my mind: https://pt.mezzo.moe/w/waYE4NkZGpqQ9qpW1th1ga?start=15m10s
I don’t know, with this example in particular, I find it quite disruptive, too, that there’s explanations of the game mechanics and then the character barges in with some funky expression and some rhethoric question à la “And then I’m that thing?”. Yeah, dude, did you not listen to the tutorial ghost explaining that just then?
In fairness, this is a game that’s pretty much story-first with a bit of puzzling in between. And it was only that Let’s Play that I saw; I would’ve almost certainly skipped that game, if I came across the store page, since I assume, it would’ve been obvious that it’s a story game.
Well, and also in fairness, this is a pretty fringe game. There’s a decent chance that it isn’t considered ‘good’ in other aspects either.In general, I don’t want to be too critical. Not every game has to be for me. Well, most don’t have to be, since I don’t play an insane variety of games to begin with. But yeah, still just wanted to throw that into the conversation as a pet peeve of mine, since there’s (perhaps less egregious) examples of that in a variety of games.
