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Progress bars going to 100%. Many games are guilty of this, Baldur's Gate 3 most recently. If 100% are loaded, why am I seeing the loading screen still? The game should be starting. You're clearly not at 100% if I'm still watching the loading screen. It should be impossible to see a fully filled progress bar.
Artificially make progress bars stop at 99% if you must, it's still better than watching 100% being a clear lie.
Are you playing MP? I've never seen this but I would suspect it's done loading and simply waiting for the other players
No, this is in single player. Both when I load the main menu and the game. On a brand new pc, too.
I would take no progress bar at all. Progress bars are inaccurate because the time it takes for an action to be done on a computer is unpredictable.
It also causes an illusion of something loading faster.
Progress bars are bad indicators for representing remaining work or time, but it's a decent indicator that something is still being done. Though it's uncommon these days, I remember several instances of older games that has stopped loading. Showing the same percent for a minute is a decent indicator that something has gone wrong.
While I don't care for percent as a displayed number, I do enjoy some kind of indicator showing that the loading is progressing.
Inventory Management. Doesn't matter what game it is. If you can get over-encumbered and it's not relevant to the game play like a survival crafting game or something I fucking hate it.
In a similar vein on skyrim, what's the point of having merchants have limited money when fast travel/wait is a thing?
All it does is make me spend 10 minutes fast traveling to all the towns to sell my stupid dragon bones. What does that even add? It doesn't add difficulty or immersion. Because of the dumb encumbrance, I can't continue playing the game until I sell all this crap, so I gotta deal with it sooner or later.
Guess I'm the weird one. I regularly use mods which give me less carry capacity and add other restrictions and such realism mods. Like, you don't have to take everything of value. It always felt weird to me that level 1 chars can carry like 300lbs/kgs/whatever of junk around and still fight effectively.
I suppose this falls under the realism category. No vendor in a "real world with fantasy elements" has infinite money and buys everything from you. And in the early game you can't fast travel everywhere. Combine this and you get a reasonable game mechanic that restricts too fast player advancement in especially the early game.
Later on you can develop a skill that lets you sell to every merchant.
I despise hub worlds - don’t make me walk around a map to access menu options. I’m currently playing Division 2 and can’t stand to find all of the people to just play the game.
The number of games that do this is to long to list: Destiny, Darktide, Fireteam.
Imagine Tarkov with a hub instead of menus. 🤢
Yup. So many games mess this up. You CAN do a good hub world, but it needs to have lots of interesting things in it, not just glorified menu options
I've always liked how the banjo kazooie games did it. Rather than being a hub world, they had a lot of stuff to do that it makes the "worlds" into sub-worlds
Witcher 3 doesnt need leveled enemies or loot. There is already a wide enough variety of monsters and equipment to convey player progression, and the leveling only exists to make sure that Geralt is as vulnerable to human enemies at the end of the game as the beginning. That's great! That's the kind of world it is. I just don't think you need constantly increasing hitpoints & a loot treadmill to keep it that way.
I wish the lower weapon skills in Morrowind didn't outright miss and make an unsatisfying "swish" sound. Maybe just reduce the damage or something, the early game is so rough because of this.
Stardew Valley: I really enjoy the game and play it on PC. It saves the game only at end of turn which is a game day. If I'm not able to finish my turn I have to put the computer to sleep instead of shut it down. Also if I make a mistake which is easy to do I have to start from the last save which can lose a good amount of progress and sometimes random pickups. Though it's my only peeve with the game so it's still doing better than most.
Another Stardew pet peeve: Not being able to switch tools during animation. You know what I mean, you are mining a stone with your pickaxe, an enemy approaches, you press the hotkey to switch to your sword only to hit him with your pickaxe because the game didn't switch tools because the mining animation wasn't over yet
The really annoying thing is that it does work when you select the hotkey slot with your coursor
Not my favorite game, but one I've been playing a lot recently is Deep Rock Galactic and I absolutely hate how most menus are physical terminals you have to walk up to interact, it's unecessary busywork. And the baffling part is you can press tab to open the mission select menu, but that's it, no other shortcuts! Why even have multiple in-game terminals?!
And to a lesser degree, the crassus detonator enemy. I absolutely despise spotting one in-game because I just know I'm going to be forced to spend the next 15 minutes mining a gold sphere inside out, it completely and utterly destroys the game flow. In summary, it blows up when dead and anything nearby in a big sphere turns into gold, the slowest mineral to mine in-game. Usually when I'm soloing I just ignore the gold, but cooping I usually don't get the satisfaction. It's infuriating because it's such a simple fix, make it drop gold nuggets instead of making the scenary around it gold, but no, gotta ruin the game flow for whatever reason.
I agree that mining crassus spheres is pretty tedious, so I just... don't. It's just some gold.
However there is kind of a faster way to do it. If you have a driller with you, he can drill out the terrain surrounding the sphere. Once the sphere has been totally disconnected from the terrain, it collapses in to a pile of nuggets in the middle. It still takes a while, but it's a lot faster than pickaxing the gold.
The first is a game design point and no matter how much you dislike it, it very probably participated in the game's success. It gives a better immersion and they did a good job at actually making the rig pleasant to go through and/or waste time in.
Crassus are straight up a waste of time though yeah, and it's a bit sad.
Any time I can't pet the dog.
Environments you can't interact with. There's shit lying around and I'm rolling my way through here. I would really like there to be physics so that the world around me is affected by what I'm doing.
Too many invisible walls. Is it really necessary to stop me from jumping around the courtyard gardens (ff16)? Let me get all up close and personal with the environment. Let me yeet myself off a random cliff.
Related: buildings that you can't go into. Yes the outside world might be cool and interesting but it's so much more immersive and realistic if buildings have interiors that you can go into. Half the fun I have in the older Pokémon games is exploring and just checking out the unique towns, listening to the town music etc, but the newest Pokémon games... If it's a building you can interact with at all, it's just a menu screen?? No visiting random apartment blocks and department stores?
And then lastly, have few to no NPCs, and if the ones that are there just stand still and don't do anything. It really annoyed me about so many of the kingdom hearts games, that you have these cool worlds that you've seen in movies and are explorable, but in all the spin off titles, there isn't a single NPC to be found in any of the worlds. It's so big and empty and boring. Let me allow myself to believe we're visiting these video game worlds and viewing a snapshot of what fantasy life is like in this video game.
I like playing modern warfare. My pet peeve is twofold
1st, online is completely unplayable because of script kiddies having to cheat because they think their k-d ratios are more important than letting people have fun that want to play it they way it’s designed.
2nd on the campaigns the enemy players can shoot you through walls and kill you, but if you see them and try to shoot them through the walls, the walls become bulletproof.
Another game I like is GTAV online. They should get rid of the ability to buy virtual money packs. Not everyone can afford to pay $100 for $10 million virtual dollars to buy the shit that gives them the essence of i destruct ability. Oppressors come to mind on this. You can steal peoples cars left and right but if you steal an oppressor they can reclaim it while you are in mid flight killing you.
Games where you cannot see your exact dialogue choices. I really like Fallout 4 but I cannot play the game with the four generic options. It's what kept me from beating LA Noire
Favourite game is Mass Effect 1, but I don't think I have a pet peeve because a lot of them have been said before (love the Mako though, it's just that the planets BioWare built are all fucking hills!)
But I think my pet peeve for Mass Effects 2 are 2 things.
I know that they did 2 for storyline purposes, but the fact that you can't push back or anything makes 0 sense. And they also did it for people who never played 1. I just, ugh. It angers me. I love that 2 gave me my Garrus romance, but man, I just... yeah.
In Star Ocean: The Last Hope, it's really hard to have a balanced party while keeping all your party members trained up. A lot of older RPGs have this issue because of the lack of EXP sharing for reserve party members, but this game stands out as being rather new (2009) in respect to those older RPGs.
And on that note, controversial opinion: EXP sharing is a good thing! It cuts down on unnecessary grinding and gets you through the story faster, which helps with pacing in a lot of games.
Hard agree!
Lack of EXP sharing also discourages trying new things. Like you get a new party member 10 levels below your current party, and like they "look" cool... but that would mean grinding the crap out of it just to see if they are fun. So you end up just sticking with the highest party members and never touching any others.
Idk what id call my favorite but the game im currently playing is Borderlands 3 and the most annoying thing is how much spoken dialog there is. I just want to tell the npcs to shut up. Even with skipping the cut scenes there is still too much talking. The worst part is even if you walk away they still talk over the echonet. I just want to hear the badass music and guns and occasional quip from the enemies. I dont care about how much tyreen wants to suckle the vaults tits, or about her imaginary sub/dom fantasies about me.
You could turn the dialogue audio off, I'd hope there's a slider. If you're on PC there's actually a goddamn mod where you can press a button to skip the currently playing line of dialogue.
I agree, though, there's a lot of just waiting for the quest dialog to get it over with so you can get to the next objective. I really like BL3, but it does have a lot of caveats.
Mine would be the fact that you can't sort your inventory by highest sell price. I mean, come on, what were they thinking?!
Factorio: It's too addicting. You just want to keep going, even though you have better things to do.
Games like that are also notorious, at least for me, where I constantly am like "ooh if I start a new game I can do X differently, I wonder what that'll be like..."
The crosshairs/reticule in Elder Scrolls Online. I know it can be disabled with a mod, but the fact that disabling it when your weapon is sheathed is not a basic setting is completely baffling.
Being unable to open (kick in) a wooden door as a level whatnot Dragonborn because it is "locked". Looking at you Skyrim and Assassin's Creed.
Being unable to jump over a small hurdle or being allowed to climb only in certain situations like in Far Cry 6. Like, is this a Parcours game now or what? There's even a Parcours "armour" set.
Terrible inventory GUIs. AC Valhalla is one of the worst games inventory-wise. Decades ago video games did the job perfectly, there's no excuse for best practice degradation
Being unable to open (kick in) a wooden door as a level whatnot Dragonborn because it is "locked". Looking at you Skyrim and Assassin's Creed.
Yeah, you can kill a mammoth by looking at it funny, but that moldy old door could just as well be a massive wall
The being unable to open wooden doors is also so weird in games where you HAVE lockpicking. Like in skyrim you can be a master lockpicker with the skeleton key, yet some locks just... require a key? Flying in the face of all game lore.
Why do random houses have these magical locks? I understand it's for game design, but put important stuff behind things that reasonably block the player!
Random crits in TF2. They are frustrating and they only benefit those who are doing well (the more damage you do the higher the random crit chance).
As much as I hate to admit it, Battlefield 2042 has become one of my favorite video games. The gameplay is a lot better than when it first came out.
But the helicopter mechanics suck compared to Battlefield Hardline. I knew they couldn’t put helicopters in V or in 1 (which for those unaware were their WW2 and WW1 games, the two released in sequence after Hardline, which was basically cops vs robbers), so I was excited to have a more modern game with bigger maps and helicopters to fly.
Because flying helicopters is so fun. It’s hard, because they use simple physics to control the helicopters: the blades will pull the craft whatever direction is “up” for them.
In 2042 it feels like there’s training wheels on the helicopters, which makes it a little easier to learn to fly them without crashing, but it makes certain maneuvers impossible.
One thing I like doing in Hardline is tilting the machine so far forward that my lift becomes zero and I just plummet straight down. I’d do this to take cover behind a building, then I’d pull out of the dive before hitting the ground.
You can’t do that in 2042. Full forward on the stick doesn’t tip you forward far enough to lose lift. It just puts you at “full tilt”. I mean, you can crash into the ground but it’s really hard. And diving at free fall speeds isn’t possible.
Hardline’s helicopter just feels smoother. My hunch is it’s a way simpler model of the controls. It’s probably unrealistic as hell, but it feels more real because the game will actually let you just turn the chopper over.
It creates space to screw up and to do amazing things, which they’ve taken out of 2042. So you’re less likely to plant straight into a rock on your first flight, but also less likely to actually dodge a missile by outmaneuvering it.
Have you tried BattleBit Remastered? It has that old Battlefield feel. I will say though I miss Battlefield as an experience itself. I hoping the next release is a back to roots feel.
I haven’t because I’m on console with no decent gaming computer.
Lack of advanced graphics options. I want to be able to tweak the graphics so they run well on my computer without looking like crap.
Game: Sekiro
Pet Peeve: No DLC
Game: Elden Ring
Pet peeve: it's not Dark Souls 4
This goes for any game, but especially Destiny 2 because of the way Bungie lets players interact with different menus during loading screens: I hate getting kicked out of menus when I finally land on a destination, especially if it’s a social area. It’s pretty obnoxious if you’re tweaking parts of your loadout and then have to dive back into the menus to get back where you were.
When the enemy AI suicidially rushes you, especially throwing grenades, to deal any damage. Meanwhile, I have limited ammo and grenades but I can't get new grenades from enemy soldiers because they use them up on me.
Stellaris has gotten especially bad with pacifist empires building huuuge fleets that just hang out during peace time. Then they go all in on the next war that they are overprepared for, even though they could not possibly predict it. And they fight like rabid wombats, not rabbits.
IMO, Bloodborne is an almost perfect game, design-wise. But I just wish it didn't have chromatic aberration. I hate it in every game and the fact that one of my favorite games has this shit built in and you can't turn it off will always bother me.
Also the performance is horrible but I don't think many people would disagree with me on that.
My favorite vintage game is Mega Man X. My pet peeve is that Capcom completely forgot about the franchise. I wish they would have given it the Mega Man 9/10 treatment where they make a new one in the style of the original. If they did that, I would probably legitimately cry from joy.
Oni: not possible to rebind keys.
As for honorable mentions, Urban Chaos/Attack of the saucerman: I can't imagine a successful remake.