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What are your guys biggest pet peeves in games when it comes to gameplay?


Water Mage
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As the title says, what are your biggest gameplay-related pet peeves?

Mine is something I recently discovered, which is the fact that in games like Mario Odyssey and Zelda BotW is actually impossible to walk in a straight line. Actually that holds true to all 3D Mario and Zelda games. If I’m not paying attention it doesn’t really bother me, but now that I noticed it, it’s driving me insane.

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Realizing that a game has fake difficulty is one of mine. Instead of making the AI smarter, adding more tricks up their sleeve, or increasing the quality or quantity of the enemy for choosing the harder difficulties, the game just makes them hit harder, or it gives them a blatant resource bonus. It either makes the game's higher difficulties boring because you don't need to change your play-style much, or the game becomes a clear definition of "hard for the wrong reasons."

 

Despite not having played that many fighting games, I cringe whenever I see the half/quarter circle movements for special moves. Admittedly, part of this is because the only fighting games I've played (besides Smash Bros) were on a computer, and trying those moves on a keyboard isn't fun, but even with a controller I never feel confident pulling them off.

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Unskippable tutorials.  

Also, in many 3D Zelda games, when Link has his sword and shield sheathed, his hat clips into his shield for some reason.  It's really annoying, and I can't imagine it'd be that difficult to fix.

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The "bullet sponge."

This is the kind of enemy that has a truckload of life, damage reduction, periods of invulnerability, and super armor. Their attacks are hard to avoid at first, but easy to see coming after you get clobbered once or twice. Then the fight becomes a boring slog as you dodge their massively damaging attacks and chip away at their deep well of life because your weapons and attacks are universally like hurling ping pong balls at a tank.

These guys are most often associated with the fake difficulty that @Hawkwing was talking about. For a fine example of a game built on bullet sponge enemies, and how it fails to make the game any fun, look no further than Devil May Cry 2.

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Random chance critical hits and other such rng combat triggers. I tolerate these, but generally feel that there is always a better way of handling such bonuses.

Empty open worlds. Nothing can ruin a game faster than a poorly implemented open world.

Short times to kill in shooters. I would prefer that my gameplay not devolve into which player can gun down the other before there is even an opportunity to turn around and retaliate.

Overload of arbitrary mechanics. For example, I hated Tales of Zestiria in large part because they overcomplicated the once simple, elegant combat. 30+ hours in, I was still getting tutorials while having forgotten half of the pointless mechanical nuiances in the last several hundred tutorials. That was when I put the game down for good and gave it away.

Armor and weapon clipping makes my inner fashion warrior cry.

The survival genre as a whole. How did anyone come to think of managing hunger/thirst/sleep/stamina meters as fun?

Edited by Etheus
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11 hours ago, Hawkwing said:

Realizing that a game has fake difficulty is one of mine. Instead of making the AI smarter, adding more tricks up their sleeve, or increasing the quality or quantity of the enemy for choosing the harder difficulties, the game just makes them hit harder, or it gives them a blatant resource bonus. It either makes the game's higher difficulties boring because you don't need to change your play-style much, or the game becomes a clear definition of "hard for the wrong reasons."

This.

10 hours ago, Omegaprism said:

The "bullet sponge."

This is the kind of enemy that has a truckload of life, damage reduction, periods of invulnerability, and super armor. Their attacks are hard to avoid at first, but easy to see coming after you get clobbered once or twice. Then the fight becomes a boring slog as you dodge their massively damaging attacks and chip away at their deep well of life because your weapons and attacks are universally like hurling ping pong balls at a tank.

You just described what I hate most about fighting the other characters and the final boss in Fire Emblem Warriors.

Adding to this: enemies that never get staggered even though they should. Nothing pisses me off more than when an enemy just attacks me through a combo and I can't guard against the attack, because most of the time, you are comitted to your combos once you start with one.
Bonus points if the enemy has an incredibly easy time interrupting your combos and staggering you.

Another one: game mechanics / features that are way more effective in AI hands than they are in yours. Mostly comes with chance-based attacks / effects and also fits under games featuring bosses that are completely immune to these kinds of effects.
Any RPG boss that can use instant death attacks is automatically disqualified from being a fair or even a good fight. They suck. All of them.

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Had to think a while about this but one of my pet peeves is when there's no sense of direction. As in, where the fuck do i go? Also cryptic as fuck puzzles. Early Zelda games and Xenogears both suffer from this (though Xenogears at least didn't have any cryptic puzzles until near the end). Xenoblade 1's sidequests also suffer from vagueness since i need the fucking wiki to know how to complete them. Another pet peeve of mine is the "useless" level ups. In the Azure Striker Gunvolt series, the last ability you get unlocks at around lv.65. The level cap is 99. That's a problem (also, why does Gunvolt have a level up system in the first place, it's a 2D action platformer in the vein of Mega Man Zero). Having save points is another pet peeve of mine. I'd prefer being able to save wherever, not having to backtrack to a certain location. Of course, it depends on the game. Using Gunvolt as an example again, the levels are short and fast-paced. No need to have a save point in them. But then there's games that let you save wherever but when you reload the save, you're in a different place. Like, i get why they do it but if you're gonna let me save wherever, stay true to it.

15 hours ago, DragonFlames said:

Any RPG boss that can use instant death attacks is automatically disqualified from being a fair or even a good fight. They suck. All of them.

I agree with this but to an extent. It depends on the nature of the instant-death attack. If it's something that can easily be avoided or something you see coming, then i think it's fine. The final boss of Xenoblade 2 and the optional superboss Tyranotitan Kurodil (the strongest enemy in the game at Lv.130) both have instant-death attacks but the former won't use it until he's about to die and the latter's instant-death attack is actually pretty weak since both Nia and Tora resisted it, meaning i was quickly revived and the fight kept going. He only ever used it once too. That's not counting the fact that Chain Attacks are busted once you have (spoiler) on your side and that's not even counting Full Bursts, meaning it's totally possible to kill them before they even get a chance to use instant-death attacks. Both instant-death attacks can be avoided as well through well-timed Lv.3 Blade Combos or Lv.4 Blade Specials because i-frames. And while it's not an RPG (at least i don't consider it one), the "fake" final boss of Gunvolt 1 has an instant-death attack that he uses when he's close to death but it moves slowly so it's really more of a timer than anything else.

But then you have that one boss in 7th Dragon III that i forget the name of but it has instant-death attacks that can't be avoided without equipping resisting items and even then, that's just a chance. The optional Avalanche Abassy superboss, the strongest superboss in Xenoblade 1 at Lv.120, has Instant-Death Spike Damage (Spike Damage is basically an automatic counter that some enemies have and sometimes it deals damage but other times it just hits you with a status effect but Avalanche Abassy is the only one with an instant-death version of it) and it's fucking bullshit because that means you have to equip Spike Defense Gems in addition to Accuracy Gems because Xenoblade 1 has this really dumb thing where your accuracy is nerfed if you're taking on enemies that are 6+ levels higher (the level cap in Xenoblade games is 99 unless it's Xenoblade X where it's 60. Thankfully, the accuracy nerf bullshit is only a thing in Xenoblade 1). And Monado Purge, the one attack capable of nullifying Spike Damage, is mostly useless since the Avalanche Abassy has a 70% Aura Seal resist rate.

All this talk about instant-death attacks has reminded me of Tabuu's Off Waves in Super Smash Bros. Brawl and how you need frame-perfect timing to dodge them. And the horror that is trying to beat him on the hardest difficulty. Ooof, the nightmares.

Edited by Armagon
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Defeating an enemy, sometimes after a hard fought battle, and then they cutscene power their way out of it by getting up and OHKOing my characters.

Backtracking. I really dislike backtracking, even more so if for a stupid reason (like you need to get from point A to point B, but then on point B there is a gate that requires a key, so you go back to point A to take it and open the door on point B)

Maze-like dungeons, especially because I am terrible with directions.

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Games abruptly taking control away from you to show you an in-engine cutscene. As weird as it is, I prefer hard-cuts to black, followed by directed cutscenes. The Naughty Dog(I'll call it this because they're the most guilty of doing this all the time) way of doing it where it seemlessly transitions to cutscenes and seemlessly transitions out is very cinematic, but it's very awkward in gaming, where you're left with a few second where you have to process what the hell is going on, and then you have a few seconds of awkward standing around as you fumble your controller when you realize after another few seconds that you're not in a cutscene anymore. There's a whole process from "I'm playing a game" to "Oh, I'm watching a cutscene" back to "Shit, I have control again" that does the exact opposite of what developers intend. It doesn't convince me that I'm more in the world, it convinces me that I have no control and it actually takes me out way more. Ironically, I find that the old school way of doing it, where it's a hard cut to a clear cutscene, does a way better job of keeping me immersed in the game. 

On that note, I fucking hate walking and talking in games when the NPCs walk slower than your slowest movement speed. WHY DO DEVELOPERS KEEP DOING THIS?! 

Edited by Slumber
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On 12/03/2018 at 4:02 AM, Ronnie said:

Not having enough save points scattered around or not letting me save wherever I want.

Yeah, this. It's more tedious than anything. Especially if there has some bullshit ennemies

20 hours ago, DragonFlames said:

Any RPG boss that can use instant death attacks is automatically disqualified from being a fair or even a good fight. They suck. All of them.

Any ennemies using instant death in general, honnestly. Actually, I may prefer if it's the boss who have them than some random mob. Because I can prepare aginst a boss. But I can't prepare against every crap the ennemies will send after me.
Having a random chance to be utterly destroyed in any random encounter is no fun (especially if fleeing isn't instant...)

 

My problem concern too many games with different difficulty levels, most notably Atlus Games (and FE, to a lesser instant) : Harder mode shouldn't give less Experience (and/or money). Either you give me the exact same amounts, or you gives me more, but giving less is just so stupid.
It's like paying someone 100$ to deliver a package next door, but paying only 10$ to deliver this same package at the other side of the country.

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Unskippable tutorials. Maybe it's just my many years of gaming catching up to me, but I find most tutorials pretty pointless, since most game don't have unique enough mechanics or control schemes to justify them, and if they do the tutorial usually does a pretty meh-to-garbage job of actually teaching the player the intricacies of those same mechanics.

Stealth sections in games not built for them. They are never good, period, and there are better ways to have variety in how objectives are completed. Being able to brute force them is just as bad, as it illuminates just how utterly pointless they are.

Giant maps full of nothing, especially when the fast travel mechanic is bad. This does not just include open-world games, mind; Final Fantasy XII, for example, has the entire section between the Tomb of Raithwall and Draklor Laboratory full of gigantic maps with almost nothing of interest story or gameplay-wise to the point where you could cut half the areas that you have to go through and lose nothing of value.

Stat inflation and busted enemy-only skills as a substitute for actual difficulty. Making the enemies bulkier and hit harder does not equal difficulty, especially if their AI is not buffed to compensate. It's why I generally play most RPGs on easy or normal.

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Escort sections. Sometimes, your escort can't be damaged at all, but most of the time, they will die to a stiff breeze and you'll have to do it again. This is even worse if you have to carry them around. Granted, hardly anyone likes them.

Ice and water. These are really frustrating and cause plenty of ragequits. One usually gives an arbitrary time limit, the other messes with the physics. 

Illogical roadblocks. Pokemon does this a lot. The Guards in RBY, several in B2W2, and the captain barriers in SM/USUM to an extent. Also happens in Metroid, mainly Other M and Fusion.

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I just wish nurse Joy would stop wasting so much of my time and my clicks everytime I need to heal my pokemon. Just a "hello" and "here, mister" are enough. Also all of the other shopkeepers, innkeepers or whatever people I have to visit many times. 

Edited by Magical CC
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Game elements that are far and away more useful in enemy hands than when you have access to them (e.g. Counter in Awakening, Berserkers in Fates, the Hexing Rod in the same game, status effects in FE at large). Also, gimmicky mechanics that add nothing to the gameplay, and in fact actively detract from it (e.g. The pawn shop and individual money system in Genealogy of the Holy War).

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9 hours ago, Tamanoir said:

Any ennemies using instant death in general, honnestly. Actually, I may prefer if it's the boss who have them than some random mob. Because I can prepare aginst a boss. But I can't prepare against every crap the ennemies will send after me.
Having a random chance to be utterly destroyed in any random encounter is no fun (especially if fleeing isn't instant...)

 

My problem concern too many games with different difficulty levels, most notably Atlus Games (and FE, to a lesser instant) : Harder mode shouldn't give less Experience (and/or money). Either you give me the exact same amounts, or you gives me more, but giving less is just so stupid.
It's like paying someone 100$ to deliver a package next door, but paying only 10$ to deliver this same package at the other side of the country.

You just gave me flashbacks to those stupid chicken-things in Persona 5's second dungeon... *shudders* Those things were the bane of my existence.

 

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14 hours ago, Azure Sen said:

Unskippable tutorials. Maybe it's just my many years of gaming catching up to me, but I find most tutorials pretty pointless, since most game don't have unique enough mechanics or control schemes to justify them, and if they do the tutorial usually does a pretty meh-to-garbage job of actually teaching the player the intricacies of those same mechanics.

Honnestly, part of why I love Etrian Oddyssey V so much was because it avoided this. Having a game that makes you actually think, and, as such, makes you feel smart for completing it was so good. They trusted their game design skills, for once.

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Fake difficulty, and button-mashing. Those are two big ones for me. I want to actually have to think at strategize and figure out how to bring down each opponent in a way that it's fun. I don't like things like roll, stab, roll, stab, roll, stab, roll, stab, take one hit and die, go back, roll, stab, roll, stab... Even trying to hide button-mashing with cooldowns doesn't help (I'm looking at you WoW).

Oh; it's a small one, but you know how a lot of video games nowadays have the option of the hero wielding a big two-handed melee weapon? There is clearly a reason why most gamers who pick this option pick it: to feel badass. Yet, most games have it that the weapon is swung around so slowly and clumsily that it takes away the badass feel, and the slowness can often make the weapon extremely niche, if not outright useless. Why? Gameplay balance? It's a two-handed weapon! There's already gameplay balance from not being able to use a shield or off-hand weapon.

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Guest Dreamyboi

Two words:

ESCORT MISSIONS

Nearly every time it's trying too guide the world's dumbest NPC away from death and it's always frustrating. Always.

I can't think of a single good one.

Edited by Dreamyboi
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9 hours ago, Dreamyboi said:

Two words:

ESCORT MISSIONS

Nearly every time it's trying too guide the world's dumbest NPC away from death and it's always frustrating. Always.

I can't think of a single good one.

Not all escort missons are bad. I remember in Kingdom Hearts 2, where you had to escort Minnie at Disney Castle, and it was actually quite fun. I did help that Minnie could fight back, and she had a damn good attack.

Edited by Water Mage
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