Gaming trends that irk you

[Traab]

This is a bit of an odd one, im curious to hear what sort of things you see in games, preferably genres you like, that bother you. I will give an example. Lately ive been on a big idle game kick. I love these incremental games that you can play both actively and in the background. What I hate though is when these games decided to give you a 20 page info dump of instructions right at the start. They just overwhelm you with everything before you have even started playing. I prefer it when they do things step by step. "Here, do this." Then once you do that it says "See how this unlocked? You can now do this as well" A little later when you hit the next thing, it tells you how to use that. If I could compare it to something else, imagine if you played a fighting game and the first time you picked a character it posted a full list of moves, special moves, combos, combo breakers, ultimate attacks, then after the fight started you have to try to remember everything it just told you.

[Wraith]

I think the art of the tutorial is certainly one that is suffering, at present. The last dozen or so games I have played all have either way, way too short or way, way too long tutorials, and both have prevented me from really getting into the game.

Warframe and Crusader Kings 2 are the two stand-out examples. Warframe's new-user experience is famously terrible; you literally have 3 missions to teach you the basic controls and how the foundry/basic modding works, and then that's it. You're kicked into the map of the solar system, much of which is arbitrarily gated off with vague instructions like "Complete 3 Grineer Incursions" and you're left to either figure it out yourself or to cross-reference every sentence into a (fan made) wiki.

It's something that the devs have promised to look into.... repeatedly... over the last 2 years.... And I say this when I *like* Warframe.

Crusader Kings 2 has the opposite problem. The tutorial consists of dozens of drop-down boxes that appear whenever you click a tab or icon, in tiny size 8 font that changing the screen resolution doesn't fix, and it tries to get you to remember all this stuff through a pain-staking tutorial that insists you follow it's instructions to the letter, no matter how vague they might be, otherwise you cannot progress.
I was told at one point to send my army to a place on the coast of Africa and then couldn't find that place. 10 minutes in I was completely stuck, as I didn't know how to bring up my objectives, couldn't find the instruction to do that in a sea of text, and the game wouldn't make any more prompts without me clicking on exactly the right place. The only way I could find out would be to click on every icon again and read 500 words per time to hopefully find the one that did what I wanted, assuming it wasn't one of the boxes I had permanently dismissed.

I'm no luddite, I'll sit and read plenty if I need to, but this was a novel of tiny text and I eventually gave up, exasperated. Surely there has to be something in between"here's the game, go figure it out" and "here's absolutely everything that we know about everything, better starts taking notes".

[Archpaladin Zousha]

This is less a thing regarding games themselves and more on the sidelines, but of late I've become increasingly frustrated that as new games come out, fewer and fewer of them have guides. I can find dozens of well-written, detailed guides for older games like Planescape: Torment or even Dragon Age: Origins and The Witcher series on sites like GameFAQs and GameBanshee, even if there aren't strategy guide books anymore these days, but for more current games you're left to scrounge through wikis full of half-written articles and broken links or beg people for help on forums, and in the rare event that there ARE official books anymore, they'll only cover the base game and not have any information on the DLC expansions that come out later. Some of these games have been out for at least a year, and yet I can't find any more information on how to get the best endings and stuff than I could when they launched (I'm looking at YOU, Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pillars of Eternity! )!

[Resileaf]

For me, it's gotta be live service. When the game wants you to log in every day to do something, and if you don't, you feel like you've missed something and are now late compared to other people.

[Zevox]

RPGs and action/adventure games going "open-world" and treating linearity like a bad thing. I really dislike the dynamic it creates of developers populating oversized worlds with shallow filler that just isn't nearly as fun a few well-thought-out side-quests in a more linear game would be. And it would be one thing if it were confined to series like The Elder Scrolls or Assassin's Creed, which have long been defined by that design MO, or developers that specialize in it like Bethesda, but a lot of series have moved towards that when they weren't before. Bioware did so with both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, leading me to lose interest in them when they were previously one of my favorite developers; The Legend of Zelda went that way with Breath of the Wild, which made it the only main-series Zelda game I haven't played (besides the first two, which I've just never gone back to try); and the Witcher switched to it with 3, leading to me deciding that just having played 2 was enough of that for me after all. "Massive open world to explore!" popping up in a trailer is legitimately one of the fastest ways to lose my interest in a game outside of it being from a genre I just always dislike.

For me, it's gotta be live service. When the game wants you to log in every day to do something, and if you don't, you feel like you've missed something and are now late compared to other people.

Yeah, keep that crap in free-to-play mobile games where it makes some actual sense, as the entire way that the game is trying to make its money. It has no place in paid-for games.

Fortunately I haven't seen much of it in them, but it did pop up in one I just got as a gift recently. Mortal Kombat 11. Yeesh. On the one hand, that game has an admirable amount of cosmetic customization options, with 60 skins (alternate costumes and color schemes) and a bunch of gear (alternate looks for weapons, headgear, and other miscellaneous outfit pieces) for every character. On the other, they designed it like it was a mobile game in terms of how you unlock it, with a bunch of different in-game currency being used to do so, some being locked behind single-player modes that are a ridiculous grind, some of which are only available for certain periods of time on a rotation, and all of it taking so long you'd need to treat the game like a full-time job to unlock everything. And the weirdest part is that it's not even there to make you want to spend money to unlock things faster like in mobile games, because that's not even an option. It's just a ridiculous grind, in a a full-price AAA game, from a genre that has never done such a grindfest before. Just blech. I really hope other fighting games don't wind up thinking this is a good idea, because it's very much not.

[danzibr]

I agree with the lack of guides and open world complaints. And the linearity. Plenty of good games are quite linear.

I would say it’s the emphasis on graphics. I can understand graphics can get better as technology gets better, but it seems lots of new games are lackluster beyond their beauty. It doesn’t matter if you can see every strand of hair when the mechanics are mediocre and story not engaging.

[Tvtyrant]

Dull combat in RPGs. It was one thing when it was the 90s and mechanically there wasn't a lot you can do, but games like the Arkham series, Kingdom Hearts, Jade Empire and other action/RPGs shows you don't have to be boring. If the game is RT I want fast moving, flowing combat. If combat is designed to be slow and tactical I want Thief or isometric gameplay, not slapping inaccurately in a slow motion.

The over focus on perfect balance. Arena gameplay is as far from fun as I can have in a video game; I put 1,200 hours into TF2 and about five into Overwatch. The movement from RTS to MOBAs is also irritating but happened long enough ago I am basically just an old man yelling on a porch now.

[Erloas]

Not that I've played a lot of fighting games in a long time, but it wasn't that uncommon to have characters and outfits and weapons that were gated behind beating the game many different times or completing certain levels of challenges in alternate gameplay modes. Which doesn't mean it is great design, but it has been around for much longer than cellphones have existed, let alone mobile games on them.


I would say most crafting is bad. It isn't as painfully grindy as it was in the past (see early generation MMOs...) but still most are still bad. They require you to run around places many times, long after they've stopped being interesting, to gather crafting material; or they throw so much crafting material at you that you can always do everything so it is then just a time-sink or inventory management issue. Then they put it in every game type even when it adds nothing to the story and doesn't otherwise fit in feel or narrative. A good balance can be found, but most games miss it.

The other big one is optional abilities/skills/spells that don't do enough to be worth using. Buffs or debuffs that don't do enough to be worth doing over simply doing normal damage. That also includes items or abilities to clear debuffs, ability to get rid of it takes a turn and they only last a turn anyway. So many potentially interesting gameplay elements that just don't actually happen or matter.

[JNAProductions]

I would say it’s the emphasis on graphics. I can understand graphics can get better as technology gets better, but it seems lots of new games are lackluster beyond their beauty. It doesn’t matter if you can see every strand of hair when the mechanics are mediocre and story not engaging.

Agreed 100%. Mega Man X is an old game, but it still looks good because it had STYLE. And beyond that, it's just FUN.

[OutOfThyme]

RPGs and action/adventure games going "open-world" and treating linearity like a bad thing. I really dislike the dynamic it creates of developers populating oversized worlds with shallow filler that just isn't nearly as fun a few well-thought-out side-quests in a more linear game would be. And it would be one thing if it were confined to series like The Elder Scrolls or Assassin's Creed, which have long been defined by that design MO, or developers that specialize in it like Bethesda, but a lot of series have moved towards that when they weren't before. Bioware did so with both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, leading me to lose interest in them when they were previously one of my favorite developers; The Legend of Zelda went that way with Breath of the Wild, which made it the only main-series Zelda game I haven't played (besides the first two, which I've just never gone back to try); and the Witcher switched to it with 3, leading to me deciding that just having played 2 was enough of that for me after all. "Massive open world to explore!" popping up in a trailer is legitimately one of the fastest ways to lose my interest in a game outside of it being from a genre I just always dislike.

This. very much this. I hate the kind of action exploration game that basically boils down into the same set of collectible and mission types (beat enemies up at a place, open up map sections via some kind of a tower, etc.). There's some exceptions to this, like InFamous and Spider-Man, but those are mostly because combat and movement are incredibly enjoyable in those.

The good thing is that it isn't as bad in Witcher 3. The game's basically limited to the zones that the story takes place in, and the open world is mostly there for sidequests (I think? My memories of Witcher 3 are mostly about Gwent, and that one cutscene where Geralt gets wasted with certain other NPCs. That was hilarious.). I'll say that it feels a lot like Witcher 2 but with larger maps, and that's about it.

[Hypersmith]

Dull combat in RPGs. It was one thing when it was the 90s and mechanically there wasn't a lot you can do, but games like the Arkham series, Kingdom Hearts, Jade Empire and other action/RPGs shows you don't have to be boring. If the game is RT I want fast moving, flowing combat. If combat is designed to be slow and tactical I want Thief or isometric gameplay, not slapping inaccurately in a slow motion.

I swear it drives me insane. Nothing makes me drop a game faster than feeling like I'm playing something that belongs at chuck-e-cheese, with "action" that involves repetitive animations over similar levels to unlock three different abilities to advance. Exciting combat or well done tactics, one or the other.

[Keltest]

Personally, I hate it when they have "comic relief" characters who do nothing but get in your way, especially in Roleplaying games. Its one thing if the story isn't important, because that's at least just a joke that didn't land right, but for an RPG it completely takes me out of the experience whenever a character like that exists and im forced to tolerate them for no reason. If they bring nothing positive and constantly get in the way, ditch them. Being "funny" is not a redeeming feature.

[Lord Raziere]

me, I'm kind of....how to say it.....missing games like the first three paper marios, or Dragon age Origins, or the Kotors, Jade Empire, things like that. sure they were like, jankier in some areas, but I kind of miss how they played. there wasn't any.... tediousness or over-bloated collectathons, or crafting systems where you need to gather random materials you don't care about to craft things that are are shoved into your face, they felt nice and well-crafted and reasonable in time spent.

sure I'm having fun with Skyrim now, but thats only because I got so many mods on that to alter the experience the way I want. I feel as many games today don't have a good story to them, or don't have any customization, or are caught up in the battle royale craze, or doing that stupid "games as service" stuff, and I just want my well done rpgs with good story back. and its saddening because the only games that seem to be doing anything near that are those above-view isometric things that I never played and aren't interested in because they look too much like a strategy game to me rather than what I consider an rpg (pokemon and chrono trigger are outstanding exceptions), its too far away from them, to see the characters up close.

like maybe I should try those isometric crpg kind of things, but I really just want the rpgs I know and love back. rather than....whatever things are now.

[Zevox]

Not that I've played a lot of fighting games in a long time, but it wasn't that uncommon to have characters and outfits and weapons that were gated behind beating the game many different times or completing certain levels of challenges in alternate gameplay modes. Which doesn't mean it is great design, but it has been around for much longer than cellphones have existed, let alone mobile games on them.

This is a very different beast from those. The game has three types of currency: koins (yes, spelled with a K, because Mortal Kombat), souls, and hearts. There's an area called the Krypt where you wander around opening chests by paying a certain amount of each. You get some koins and souls for any fight you win, and a handful of koins even for a fight you lose, but hearts you only get for doing fatalities, mercies, or brutalities. To give you an idea of how slow this can be, take hearts: you get three per fatality or mercy, and 5 per brutality. You can do a mercy in the same match as a fatality or brutality, so your max hearts from a single match is 8, though often it will be 6 if you don't get the specific conditions for a brutality. A single chest that uses hearts as its currency costs either 100 or 250 to open - and I'm pretty sure there's more of the latter than the former. And the Krypt is pretty damned big in general, so there's plenty of chests around for you to open.

But wait, that's not all. Even once you open all of the chests, there's still stuff that wants your currency. Some of the items in the Krypt are only available from a shrine where you can give koins as an offering to unspecified gods. For 50,000+ koins, you'll usually get a piece of gear or two, and for 100,000+, you'll usually get a skin. And these are totally random, basically a lootbox. And again, there's a lot of these to get - I'm not sure exactly how many are locked to the shrine specifically, but there's 60 skins per character, and a couple hundred gear pieces per character total, split up among different places. And for individual fights, you're getting a few thousand koins - just a couple of hundred for a loss. You can get larger numbers doing a mode called the Towers of Time (the largest I've seen being about 67k koins), but only as one-time payouts for the first time you clear each of them (and that's just the ones that offer that reward, not all of them do). Run out of those, and your koin gain will drop dramatically.

And speaking of the Towers of Time, that's where most of the stuff not available in the Krypt is found. Some of them you can pick to do whenever - though you need to pay a certain amount of koins, which increases as you go up the difficulty ladder, to "summon" each tower. Oh, and even once you do, you need to unlock the individual towers, sometimes by paying some of the various currencies, often by doing a certain number of supers/fatalities/brutalities/flawless victories/etc with the appropriate character elsewhere - and any that you've done before summoning the towers don't count. Others, you're at the mercy of the game's rotation. Every so many hours the towers that are available change, and you have zero control over which of those are there when. Hope ones with rewards for the characters you like happen to show up when you have time to play, because that's the only way you're getting those.

Yeah, this is a far cry from unlocking Akuma by beating arcade mode on a high difficulty or something, it's very reminiscent of mobile games in just how many hoops it makes you jump through, and the way they're structured. It's designed to eat a ton of your time - it's just that unlike in mobile games, it's not even doing that to try and make you want to buy a shortcut, because none exists.

[Aeson]

Early access. Especially full-price early access.

Always online, even for strictly-singleplayer games, or the semi-always online of "well, you can play it, but you can't play these parts of it that you already paid for without being online even though it's a singleplayer section."

Third-party programs required to run your game. No, I don't want to launch Steam, or Origin, or whatever sales platform spyware you require me to install on my computer just to install your damn game every time I want to play it.

Small DLC packs instead of decent-sized expansions.

Advertising your DLC inside the game, especially if it's done intrusively - "have a free update that expands the map to include India. What can you do in India? Well, if you buy our (then) new Rajas of India DLC you can play an Indian prince. Otherwise the game's more or less exactly the same as it used to be, except the game now runs more slowly because we added all this stuff that's more or less irrelevant unless you buy our new DLC."

"Season passes." Especially if half your DLC is irrelevant stuff like soundtracks or alternate unit skins.

[DaedalusMkV]

This is a very different beast from those.
<snip>

So, that all sounds a great deal like something I remember quite well. From a game from the same genre as the new Mortal Kombat, actually.

Wait, did I say same genre? I meant same series. Twice. Mortal Kombat Deception and Deadly Alliance had exactly the same feature, though they didn't have two currencies. They had five. And they didn't just put skins and cosmetics in there; they locked characters behind those chests. If you didn't go read a guide on exactly where to go to unlock all the Krypt characters, you were now unlocking chests at random, from a pool of nearly a thousand. You might as well not even try. Even if you had infinite Koins (and there were ways to cheat to achieve that), it would still take nearly two hours just to go through the animations and inputs to unlock all those chests. Most of which just had concept art, song selections and other nonsense which had nothing to do with gameplay at all. And if you didn't cheat the currency, it would take hundreds of hours of playtime to grind enough to open all the chests. None of which could be versus mode, because you only got Koins from the campaign, arcade mode and Puzzle Kombat (which was garbage).

So yeah, not terribly new. Mortal Kombat specifically has been doing the 'non-paid in-game currency to unlock bonuses' thing since the PS2 era. Frankly, the version in MK11 sounds much less terrible than the one I remember from the old days. Especially in Deadly Alliance it was just horrid. Not really sure why they decided to bring it back.

[Spore]

Achievements. Yes this started 10 years ago. Now every game is cluttered with pointless bullcrap to collect.

RPGs that fear they are infringing on a person's rights if they gate away some content behind specific class requirements. Damn it, I am a paladin, I should not be able to be instantly trusted by a secret cult of demon worshippers.

And RPGs that secret away their cool memberships behind long (but interesting) quests and requirements. It's just not rewarding when you waltz into the HQ of organization xy and are greeted with a free uniform, a complementary welcome package, a weapon and some flowers. Back in the olden days (I'm talking Gothic 2 here), you were a nobody. You dug yourself out of rubble, asked the farmer if you could help him, and he thinks you're annoying and sends you to certain death by bandits. Entering the damn hub city was a quest. Joining a starting faction was not one but I think 4 quests. By the time 4 quests are done in other games you are assistant guild leader in other games.

[Corlindale]

Forced mini-games have always bothered me. I don't mind mini-games being a thing, when done well they can be nice change of pace from the main action. But I strongly dislike being forced into them, especially if it takes up a significant chunk of the gameplay.

The Ratchet & Clank games I find especially annoying in this regard. These games have pretty much nailed their regular gameplay - you get a huge arsenal of customizable, upgradeable weapons to kill things with (which all gain experience upon use and have their own levelling tracks), and it's amazingly good fun. So why on earth do they feel the need to interrupt the flow every so often and force the player to do decidedly mediocre puzzle sections, or less-than-mediocre rail-shooter or 2D-platformer sections?

Games with only 1 save file also bug me a lot. Sometimes I want to start over without having to wipe the entire progress from my first game - why is that so difficult to understand? I love Raymand Legends, but that aspect of the game is exceptionally obnoxious. Yes, I know you can manually fiddle with the save files, but that should really not be necessary in this day and age.

[PraetorDragoon]

For me, it is crafting. Not every game needs you to scour the land for ores, plants, or animal drops to get potions or gear. And usually this crafted gear is way better than anything that drops by enemies. Bleh.

[Rodin]

Crafting is my big one, or even worse "Survival". Which basically boils down to enforced crafting. Take an injury in a fight? No healing potion for you. You have to find rags, duct tape, an antiseptic o make a bandage, then find a piece of wood and an axe to make a splint, and then...

I like the idea of tracking temperature and having injuries that are non-trivial to heal. The way this is implemented in game is just invariably annoying.

Advertising your DLC inside the game, especially if it's done intrusively - "have a free update that expands the map to include India. What can you do in India? Well, if you buy our (then) new Rajas of India DLC you can play an Indian prince. Otherwise the game's more or less exactly the same as it used to be, except the game now runs more slowly because we added all this stuff that's more or less irrelevant unless you buy our new DLC."

The worst is when they integrate the DLC without accounting for you not having the DLC. Borderlands 2 is pretty terrible about this. You open a treasure chest and find loot, and oh look! It's class restricted gear for a DLC class you don't own! Why don't you go buy the character and try it out!

Gag.

Any kind of loot box thing put into the game also really bugs me, especially when they give you a free "sample". The free sample is invariably of a mcuh higher power level or rarity than you could ordinarily get, and they obfuscate what they're doing until you're re-directed to the store page and realize you've been had.

[gooddragon1]

RPGs and action/adventure games going "open-world" and treating linearity like a bad thing. I really dislike the dynamic it creates of developers populating oversized worlds with shallow filler that just isn't nearly as fun a few well-thought-out side-quests in a more linear game would be. And it would be one thing if it were confined to series like The Elder Scrolls or Assassin's Creed, which have long been defined by that design MO, or developers that specialize in it like Bethesda, but a lot of series have moved towards that when they weren't before. Bioware did so with both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, leading me to lose interest in them when they were previously one of my favorite developers; The Legend of Zelda went that way with Breath of the Wild, which made it the only main-series Zelda game I haven't played (besides the first two, which I've just never gone back to try); and the Witcher switched to it with 3, leading to me deciding that just having played 2 was enough of that for me after all. "Massive open world to explore!" popping up in a trailer is legitimately one of the fastest ways to lose my interest in a game outside of it being from a genre I just always dislike.


Yeah, keep that crap in free-to-play mobile games where it makes some actual sense, as the entire way that the game is trying to make its money. It has no place in paid-for games.

Fortunately I haven't seen much of it in them, but it did pop up in one I just got as a gift recently. Mortal Kombat 11. Yeesh. On the one hand, that game has an admirable amount of cosmetic customization options, with 60 skins (alternate costumes and color schemes) and a bunch of gear (alternate looks for weapons, headgear, and other miscellaneous outfit pieces) for every character. On the other, they designed it like it was a mobile game in terms of how you unlock it, with a bunch of different in-game currency being used to do so, some being locked behind single-player modes that are a ridiculous grind, some of which are only available for certain periods of time on a rotation, and all of it taking so long you'd need to treat the game like a full-time job to unlock everything. And the weirdest part is that it's not even there to make you want to spend money to unlock things faster like in mobile games, because that's not even an option. It's just a ridiculous grind, in a a full-price AAA game, from a genre that has never done such a grindfest before. Just blech. I really hope other fighting games don't wind up thinking this is a good idea, because it's very much not.

I personally like open world games. I figure that if you have it open world you can mod it to make it more linear. Whereas if it's super linear like cyberpunk 2077 might be(?), it's going to be harder to mod.

Skyrim had some mod for a time traveling murder mystery for example. Linear games also have only so much replayability value.

That's just how I feel about it.

As for what annoys me, games that are always online. If my internet isn't working, I don't want to have problems playing a game that has barely any business being online only.

[Wraith]

I would say it’s the emphasis on graphics. I can understand graphics can get better as technology gets better, but it seems lots of new games are lackluster beyond their beauty. It doesn’t matter if you can see every strand of hair when the mechanics are mediocre and story not engaging.

I agree with this, whole-heartedly. Nigh photo-realistic graphics have been in gaming for some time now - I'd say for at least a decade, since Mass Effect 3 was 2012 and I remember games before that which were close, or better, and not including cut scenes or even whole movies prior to that.
Getting to <Current Year Argument> and many games' big selling point is that they are "four times as detailed" as their predecessor is not impressive to me when the predecessor was itself an immaculate depiction of a grey-brown wasteland populated by generic-looking white men with the same "stubble and cropped hair" motif as the rest.

Give me stylised art every time.
It might not be as technically perfect or be as technologically impressive, but I much prefer games that look cartoony like Borderlands 2 or Breath of the Wild but are loud, bright and fun to look at, to say nothing of the extra time that can be put into the story and characterisation instead of counting individual specks of duct settling on the protagonist's clothing.

Thankfully we seem to be getting over that particular vice in recent years - the late 2000's/early 2010's were rife with bland Modern Warfare/Call of Duty clones - but it still hangs on, even in this year's E3 presentation.

[danzibr]

Achievements. Yes this started 10 years ago. Now every game is cluttered with pointless bullcrap to collect.

RPGs that fear they are infringing on a person's rights if they gate away some content behind specific class requirements. Damn it, I am a paladin, I should not be able to be instantly trusted by a secret cult of demon worshippers.

And RPGs that secret away their cool memberships behind long (but interesting) quests and requirements. It's just not rewarding when you waltz into the HQ of organization xy and are greeted with a free uniform, a complementary welcome package, a weapon and some flowers. Back in the olden days (I'm talking Gothic 2 here), you were a nobody. You dug yourself out of rubble, asked the farmer if you could help him, and he thinks you're annoying and sends you to certain death by bandits. Entering the damn hub city was a quest. Joining a starting faction was not one but I think 4 quests. By the time 4 quests are done in other games you are assistant guild leader in other games.

I have a different takes on achievements. I like the idea, but there’s a huge disparity in how they’re implemented. Some games you basically just beat it and get a platinum (or whatever). Some games you have to beat on the highest difficulty without being hit in 3.5 hours.

Edit: or worse, grind dozens of hours to make every single piece of equipment, even junk you’ll never use.

[Vinyadan]

I'll go with reskinning old games and marketing them as sequels, although it can occasionally be nice. Tribes Ascend was described as a Starsiege:Tribes copycat, but it still was a good idea per se, because of how online games work (plus it was gratis). Stuff like Stronghold Crusader II or Cossacks 3 (this one based on reviews), however, looks a bit excessive.

Then there are DLCs, of course, as others have said. I miss the days in which you would buy a game, and then buy an expansion, and that was that. Like Supreme Commander to Forged Alliance, or Age of Kings to Conquerors, you had real improvements. In other cases, the expansion could be rather crappy (Primal Hunt), but that was it. Now there are all of these little DLCs, I generally have no idea of what they do, so I simply don't buy them. I look at Sims 3, see a 10-year old game that costs 40$, and then see added content for... 500$? Do I have to do a marketing research to choose what to buy?

This might be me, but it feels like RTS is drying up. There are some nice grand strategy games out there, but I have not heard of a game as magnificent as Supreme Commander (and FA) since it was released. Supreme Commander had good maps, layers of complexity, lots of units, huge scale, and a few similar, yet well distinct, factions. (it did have a weird weakness, in that unit range was not shown dynamically as in e.g. Cossacks 2, and it was hard to evaluate terrain roughness, so you could build a turret that only covered two cm in front of it, or watch two tanks beating the **** out of a hill standing between them). While I think Deserts of Kharak has great atmosphere and is a good game, its size looks a lot smaller (for what I saw while playing, it's essentially a game around a SC Fat Boy), and, more importantly, it seems to be outside of the public consciousness. By comparison, I remember a time when Age of Empires and Warcraft III effectively took over the gaming world.

Also, everything that forces me to do a google search to understand what people are talking about. I mean, not as part of the game: as part of the market superstructure. I have no idea of what loot boxes are, or what steam cards do, and I must have made more than one search about those.

[LibraryOgre]

This is a bit of an odd one, im curious to hear what sort of things you see in games, preferably genres you like, that bother you. I will give an example. Lately ive been on a big idle game kick. I love these incremental games that you can play both actively and in the background. What I hate though is when these games decided to give you a 20 page info dump of instructions right at the start. They just overwhelm you with everything before you have even started playing. I prefer it when they do things step by step. "Here, do this." Then once you do that it says "See how this unlocked? You can now do this as well" A little later when you hit the next thing, it tells you how to use that. If I could compare it to something else, imagine if you played a fighting game and the first time you picked a character it posted a full list of moves, special moves, combos, combo breakers, ultimate attacks, then after the fight started you have to try to remember everything it just told you.

Conversely, I hate the unskippable tutorial. I had to restart on Empires and Puzzles because I got a new phone, and it took the game FOREVER to let me log in and resume my previous game. Related: Burying the sound controls. I play all my phone games on silent. I often play them while my kids are going to sleep. Let me turn off the sound!

Related to that, the intro movie. Mass Effect is particularly bad about this, IMO. Like, I have made my character, start me in a training sim or something.

[Aotrs Commander]

The good old C&C style, plot driven RTS seems to have had its final gasp in Starcraft 2 after a long void.

I agree with the lack of guides and open world complaints. And the linearity. Plenty of good games are quite linear.

I would say it’s the emphasis on graphics. I can understand graphics can get better as technology gets better, but it seems lots of new games are lackluster beyond their beauty. It doesn’t matter if you can see every strand of hair when the mechanics are mediocre and story not engaging.

Agreed.

Graphics, especially, reached the point for me of "good enough" long ago.

The good thing is that it isn't as bad in Witcher 3. The game's basically limited to the zones that the story takes place in, and the open world is mostly there for sidequests (I think? My memories of Witcher 3 are mostly about Gwent, and that one cutscene where Geralt gets wasted with certain other NPCs. That was hilarious.). I'll say that it feels a lot like Witcher 2 but with larger maps, and that's about it.

Witcher 3 remains the one and ONLY open world game I've not just got bored with and gave up (after Morrowind, Fallout 3 and Oblivion, I never bothered with one again). To W3's credit, it held my interest for over two hundred hours by having enough variety of content to keep me interested (though I'll grant you, the middle stretch of going through all the sea question marks was a bit of a dull stretch, but it WAS a self-inflicted one).

I have a different takes on achievements. I like the idea, but there’s a huge disparity in how they’re implemented. Some games you basically just beat it and get a platinum (or whatever). Some games you have to beat on the highest difficulty without being hit in 3.5 hours.

Edit: or worse, grind dozens of hours to make every single piece of equipment, even junk you’ll never use.

Ironically, the one set of achievements I actually think might be worth doing are the ones in the Paradox grand strategy games, where they are more of "do this challenge" than "do this thing umptween twiddly times," but PDX locked them behind Ironman mode, so they will remain things I will never get, other than by using as an idea.

[Resileaf]

By comparison, I remember a time when Age of Empires and Warcraft III effectively took over the gaming world.

Well, it's probably not a coincidence that these two games are getting remastered.

[Man_Over_Game]

Controls that seem to be contrary to players' expectations, or intentionally difficult.

Specifically, I'm talking about the Gears of War games. I feel like they intentionally made the control scheme frustrating and awkward in order to artificially ramp up the difficulty or allow more "depth" to cover-based combat.

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Speed-based RTS games. I feel like actions-per-second is often more important than strategy. Or maybe I'm just looking for slower RTS's. It does seem wrong to me that having technical mastery of the UI is an important part of a strategy game, but maybe that's just me trying to justify my own hubris.

***********

Having RPG elements that only add stat buffs instead of changing how you play.

Using Borderlands 2 as an example, almost all of Axton's build options all play the exact same way: Spawn Turret, Shoot Things. It doesn't matter that he has 3 different trees that all have different benefits, they all do the same thing. You do not play any differently depending on which one you invest in, and it ends up detracting from the replayability. Why would I invest 100+ hours into a single character if it plays the exact same from level 1 to 80?

Or I could play something like Athena from Borderlands: The Pre Sequel, and each of her trees focuses on entirely new and exciting playstyles (Enemies attack Athena to make her stronger, Athena dash-attacks enemies to cause them to bleed, Athena afflicts groups of enemies with multiple DoTs). Now I have 3 playstyles to play around with (4 if you count the default way of playing Athena) while leveling up, where Axton only ever has 1.

Or, basically, if you're going to give me choices in how to develop my character, please make those choices change how I play. Otherwise, just don't bother and make it a generic scaling level up system.

[Lord Raziere]

Agreed.

Graphics, especially, reached the point for me of "good enough" long ago.

Yeah? like, I'm playing skyrim. with some appearance mods of course, but I don't feel much of a desire for more graphics and I kind of don't want my videogames to look too much like real life, because then it starts getting into that "will I be able to tell reality from the virtual one" nightmare scenario. like I myself while like how good graphics are, much prefer it remains clear that its still a video game in looks.

we do not need better visuals anymore, we need better mechanics. better game play. like we've gotten shiny stuff now, but we're still playing the same basic mechanics we had like, a decade ago. battle royales are just a different mode for shooters, loot boxes are just randomized loot that is now being called out as a form of gambling.

at least nintendo is good. their static, slow to change way of doing things is frustrating at times, but at least they're consistently good.

[Swaoeaeieu]

This is a bit of an odd one, im curious to hear what sort of things you see in games, preferably genres you like, that bother you. I will give an example. Lately ive been on a big idle game kick. I love these incremental games that you can play both actively and in the background. What I hate though is when these games decided to give you a 20 page info dump of instructions right at the start. They just overwhelm you with everything before you have even started playing. I prefer it when they do things step by step. "Here, do this." Then once you do that it says "See how this unlocked? You can now do this as well" A little later when you hit the next thing, it tells you how to use that. If I could compare it to something else, imagine if you played a fighting game and the first time you picked a character it posted a full list of moves, special moves, combos, combo breakers, ultimate attacks, then after the fight started you have to try to remember everything it just told you.

totally unrelated to the thread, but yess! someone else who likes idle games. do you have any good recommendations, i have played a bunch and my current one, NGU idle is slowing down so i would like to add another to my screen of number filling up :)