annoyances in games

I know everyone has them. Those nitpicks in games that annoy you.

Most of mine are mechanical. Some of mine are:

-Simon says button mashing sequences - they were great in god of war and shenmue, but it seems as though any game must have them, its like a law or something.

-Classes in RPG's - Really, why have classes in RPG's. Developers are trying to stay with their tabletop fantasy roleplaying game mechanics. Why have a wizard, who is physically weak, but dishes out damage in much the same way as a warrior. Why not just play a warrior? With Tabletop RPG's, wizards were a viable option because they could do things that weren't combat related. But seeing as all games are just combat engines with pretty graphics attached to them, wizards and rougish characters are useless.

- To-Hit-Rolls - Another example of videogames paying homage to their Tabletop Gaming roots. To hit rolls are really only needed in games in which you use your imagination. With visual representation of my character, they become obsolete. The character's animation swings and lodges their sword right in the body of my adversary, but the words *MISS* appear over their head. Umm... what? :? my sword hit him. I know its supposed to be a mechanic that exemplifies growth in the character, at first you miss a lot, then you get better. But instead of missing a lot, why not open up more powerful and useful moves to me other than "swing sword, Swing sword again, Swing sword again"

- My only other qualm has to be in the graphics department. With the power of our systems now, we can render these huge environments, hundreds of characters on screen at once and do insane physics calculations... but my hair and cape is still antigravity and incorporeal apparently? I know its just a little nitpick thing, but developers should focus on the little things before moving on to the big, more complex things.

Repeat bosses; if I beat him once, I shouldn't have to do it again...and againyodariquo

Agreed. games in which you fight a boss, then later in the game that "boss" becomes some "elite enemy" is just annoying and hinders one's sense of suspension of disbelief. Bosses are supposed to be fun, challenging, one time events.

-Repeat bosses; if I beat him once, I shouldn't have to do it again...and again -No save points before bosses; either it's too easy so they don't seem like bosses, or hard and it's just a pain to go back -DS novelty functions; "speak into the microphone now!", "draw the bunny!", "oh oh! CLOSE THE SCREEN!" -Unskippable introductions and cinematics -Respawning enemies -Infinitely respawning enemies -Lack of direction / wandering game design; give me some clue as to WHERE to go, and a way for me to be reminded if I don't play it for a while -Easy final bosses -Automatic cameras until someone does it right -Sports games that remove features or don't match features from a decade ago -Only one save file per game -Framerate drops -Slowly scrolling textyodariquo

Wow, I agree with many of those. The first one in particular reminds me of one of my favorite RPGs, Final Fantasy X. (No spoiler) but there is a certain character in that game fits that description perfectly.

Lack of save points before bosses can tick me off. I also hate it when you must fight a continuous guantlet of bosses without the ability to save and/or recover in between. This happens in a quite a few RPGs.

In my eyes, Lack of Direction = Poor game design (Specificially I mean that in the sense: "Ok, I dunno where i'm supposed to go let alone what i'm supposed to do")

Easy final bosses can mean a weak climax.

Sports games that remove features. I wrote an entire blog on this (its recent, you can still see if on the first page of my profile). EA freakin' removed (IMO) the best partner to the best feature of NCAA Football from the current gen version of 08, the "Create-A-School" mode. Creating a school then building them into a Dynasty in Dynatsy mode is so much fun, but for some reason, its been omitted. WHY?!?!?

Slowly scrolling text. *Cough*Zelda*Cough*

Overly cheap bosses.

[QUOTE="yodariquo"]-Repeat bosses; if I beat him once, I shouldn't have to do it again...and again -No save points before bosses; either it's too easy so they don't seem like bosses, or hard and it's just a pain to go back -DS novelty functions; "speak into the microphone now!", "draw the bunny!", "oh oh! CLOSE THE SCREEN!" -Unskippable introductions and cinematics -Respawning enemies -Infinitely respawning enemies -Lack of direction / wandering game design; give me some clue as to WHERE to go, and a way for me to be reminded if I don't play it for a while -Easy final bosses -Automatic cameras until someone does it right -Sports games that remove features or don't match features from a decade ago -Only one save file per game -Framerate drops -Slowly scrolling textVMan

Wow, I agree with many of those. The first one in particular reminds me of one of my favorite RPGs, Final Fantasy X. (No spoiler) but there is a certain character in that game fits that description perfectly.

Lack of save points before bosses can tick me off. I also hate it when you must fight a continuous guantlet of bosses without the ability to save and/or recover in between. This happens in a quite a few RPGs.

In my eyes, Lack of Direction = Poor game design (Specificially I mean that in the sense: "Ok, I dunno where i'm supposed to go let alone what i'm supposed to do")

Easy final bosses can mean a weak climax.

Sports games that remove features. I wrote an entire blog on this (its recent, you can still see if on the first page of my profile). EA freakin' removed (IMO) the best partner to the best feature of NCAA Football from the current gen version of 08, the "Create-A-School" mode. Creating a school then building them into a Dynasty in Dynatsy mode is so much fun, but for some reason, its been omitted. WHY?!?!?

Slowly scrolling text. *Cough*Zelda*Cough*

Overly cheap bosses.

I hate bad camera angles. Seriously, I want to see what I am doing on screen, rather than trying to guess behind a big gray wall. I remember when I would run into the cars in the first level of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, and the camera would totally spaz out every single time.

Porting extremely old games to new consoles for fifty dollars.

Remaking an older video game, and not fixing the main problems of it, and instead add unnecesarry things that no one wants.

Unskippable cut-scenes.

Slow-starting RPGs.

Short games.

Backtracking. This is another big one. This is one reason why Metroid Prime wasn't as much as fun as it could've been for me. I get to this exciting new place, only to find out that I have to walk all the way back to the planet I was just at to get some other object, and fight the same enemies I've already fought many times before.

Games that don't let you save whenever you want. If I'm an hour into a game without saving, and someone in my family dies, I want to save then and there! I don't want to have to go through some complicated thing to get to the only save point. That's just stupid.

Other things...

Timed events- There are numerous games that had an objective point and you have a certain time to get and complete the objective point. This is not a huge problem and I know it is sometimes part of the story, but I just don't like it in games. It also kinda makes me more panicky and have a lot of adrenaline when I just want to relax.

Like what some user above me mentioned enemies before bosses- I don't know what the developers are thinking by adding enemies right before a checkpoint after your last save point. Sometimes I die in a boss fight and I have to start in the last checkpoint fighting some enemies before heading to the boss. The enemy is more of an annoyance and distraction because the moment before fighting a boss, you would like to focus on a boss more before getting rid of the enemies.

I actually can't recall a cheap boss at the time being, maybe one in FFXII with all those status effects.yodariquo

Wow, we really are on the same page! That particular boss in FFXII is one of the main ones I had in mind I remember one of the, if not the very first words the strategy said about the boss were "This Battle is a Status Effects Nightmare". And don't get me started on how the boss's defense and speed and strength just shoot through the roof when they're down to their last 1/3 of health. lol, also, I recently vented my frustration with this game in my blog as well.

Coincidences...

[QUOTE="yodariquo"]I actually can't recall a cheap boss at the time being, maybe one in FFXII with all those status effects.VMan

Wow, we really are on the same page! That particular boss in FFXII is one of the main ones I had in mind I remember one of the, if not the very first words the strategy said about the boss were "This Battle is a Status Effects Nightmare". And don't get me started on how the boss's defense and speed and strength just shoot through the roof when they're down to their last 1/3 of health. lol, also, I recently vented my frustration with this game in my blog as well.

Coincidences...

Disappearing corpses: I hate it when I shoot or kill aguy and he disappears. I like shooting dead corpses. :P This happens all the time in Medal of Honor Heroes 2. I just picked up my copy a few days ago. It was pretty good. (Read my review , 7.5) Then, when I start killin' people they disappear before they even hit the ground!!!

Unable to skip cut-scenes

ESRB

Dumb AI

Reapeating bosses

Bad replay value

Short games

No co-op

Bad graphics

A lot of mine have been touched on already, but I'll list a few that come to mind.

-Unskippable cutscenes. This is especially annoying when you're playing a game through again. I've noticed that a couple of EA games have unskippable cutscenes that you have to watch the first time you play through. The BF 2142 demo and Crysis both come to mind. The most annoying thing is they pause when I alt-tab out to do something else while it's playing. Urgh.

-Games relying on cutscenes or scripted events too much to make the game dramatic. The occasional one here and there is okay, but games that use both of these pretty heavily get old fast. Too many cutscenes in particular is aggravating. I put in a game to play it, not watch it.

-Unclear objectives in gameplay. I don't need my hand held, but if you want me to do something that would be out of the ordinary, or extremely specific, make that known somehow in the game.

-Tedious tutorial areas in games. This mainly seems to happen in JRPGs, but I've found some other examples like in Twilight Princess. There's some fairly helpful information and tips to be gleaned from these areas, but most of these areas can be tiresome to get through. If you're going to have me round up goats or retrieve cats to teach me some game mechanics, how about intermixing that with something more exciting. If there's a lot to picked up, mix it in with adventure and have the player learn in doses.

-Not having a quicksave/save anywhere function. I don't really buy the argument that a game isn't challenging enough if you can just save when you want. I've already proved I'm capable of reaching the point in the game where I died, and I don't care for replaying that over and over just to get back to the point where I can actually attempt to make new progress.

Check point systems in general can be pretty annoying. They're definitely getting better, like in the case of Call of Duty and the Halo series, but are still lacking. My main gripe is when they're either not occuring often enough, or when you have to replay to fix a messed up save. It's really annoying to have to replay an entire chapter over because you get hit with a blast that dropped your shield and your health down to one bar and have to wait for it to refresh everytime you load. The most aggravating one is where I was getting overrun in one of those defend missions in Call of Duty 2 on veteran. The checkpoint saved right in the middle of the reload animation. Oy.

-Bad camera controls.

EDIT - Had to add escort missions. I've hardly ever seen these done well in games, yet they appear so often. The AI usually seems to do everything it can to make it harder, as well. Guild Wars had some of the worst. Whoever you were supposed to protect would run right into a group of mobs too hard for it and then whine something like "help us! They're too strong". Well, that's what you get for charging into them moron.

In some games, they seem to forget that they were supposed to be following you along the way.

i hate it when they make 'beep beep' noises when the text appears in dialog.

How about for the oldschool gamers. That damn TIME LIMIT in almost every old game. I don`t like to be rushed through any given game when I`m trying to; look for hidden items, want to backtrack and find an easier path (Sonic,Mario..etc) and almost run out of time before a boss battle. I know nothing can be done about these older games, but with all these classic collections and Arcade/Virtual Console games that are out now, you think that the time limits in these games would become an option.

Restricted race coursesto certain cars in racing games. Gran Turismo/Forza. Man if I spent all this time on tuning up a certain car that I love so much and I find out that I can only race it on two or three legues and in those I get to race the same courses again and again and again, I get alittle ticked off. Can you say Forza 2.:roll:

If I said what annoys the hell out of me in video games then I'd be reppeating everything Zero Punctuation and GodModeEnabled said!

Here's a link to Zero Punctuations reviews if you don't know what I'm talking about.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation

God of War Infinitely respawning enemies - effects.yodariquo

Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 enemies

Slowly scrolling text. *Cough*Zelda*Cough*

VMan

Yessss!!! And then out of frustration I'd hit the (B) button, which just ends up skipping the whole dialogue, and I'm left there like O_O "oops..."

I really really get annoyed at really long field space in a game. I first became aware of it in Xenosaga 1...just making Shion run and run and run through REALLY boring, plain rooms that were needlessly huge! UGH! I started to play with my toes and read a book. It felt like such a waste of time getting through those rooms!

If I said what annoys the hell out of me in video games then I'd be reppeating everything Zero Punctuation and GodModeEnabled said!

Here's a link to Zero Punctuations reviews if you don't know what I'm talking about.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation

ElArab

-Simon says button mashing sequences - they were great in god of war and shenmue, but it seems as though any game must have them, its like a law or something.

blooddemon666

Someone likes Zero Punctuation.

Mine- AI that just runs around everywhere.

uninspired enviornments

no save anywhere/anytime

dumb puzzles that have nothing to do with using your brain but just randomly trying things to see if they work

thats the worst one IMO

-Repeat bosses; if I beat him once, I shouldn't have to do it again...and again

-No save points before bosses; either it's too easy so they don't seem like bosses, or hard and it's just a pain to go back oh oh!

-Unskippable introductions and cinematics

-Only one save file per game -Framerate drops -Slowly scrolling textyodariquo

-I definitely agree.

-This is a big problem for me, most of the time I find myself leaving the system on so that I won't lose what I played.

-It irritates me when it is right before a boss battle because I will be forced to watch it at least ten times before I beat that part of the game.

-I had to go and get a new memory card so that my dad could play some of my games.

2 things mostly.

1- When you cut any gameplay in mid-developpment and send everyone in your geekier uber version of the game. See, you solo/group for 60 levels in a game, I should end my game by soloing/grouping...not by raiding, PvPing or whatever a geek think is more worthy. Sure, the "endgame" can be harder, but it has to be the same thing, not something new which is unrelated to the game so far. What makes raiding soo easy to make as a mistake, from a programmer point of view, more HPS/Stats = better reward. From a programmer point of view, it makes sense. From a design point of view, instead of having to go and play right away(solo) or to get a few friends (group), you now need to find a whole bunch of peoples, set firm rules, and arrange this all...this is not even remotedly similar...raiding has nothing to do with grouping from a design point of view, anyone saying otherwise is a programmer, not a designer. :P

2- When an old mistake which was proven bad and wrong is brought back to life in new games...example: Soul-Meter in NWN2 Mask of the Betrayer...EATING METERS are gone and almost nobody want them back, keep them away! They where rampant in the 80ish, now gone. We don't suddenly want them back!