Things you're tired of seeing in video games

Let's see.... What do I hate about video games....

DLC with no game play value:

Now I like DLC that enhances the game, like Dragonborne for Skyrim. Extra missions, a new story arc, new powers.... But DLC that is pointless... Like Hearthfire for Skyrim... Adopt two kids that are just annoying (One I can't even interact with) and build some houses that when you put armour in the armoury it just vanishes.... Thanks for the whole day wasted cause the last save that would get all the Daedric quest items back was from the previous day..... (auto save situation)

Talking of Autosave....

Pointless Autosaving:

You complete a mission.... okay auto save... Sure... Do something important... Autosave .... No problem... I open my inventory I don't want to friggin autosave... Nor if I go into a house or three seconds after I manually save do I think it is required to autosave. Keep autosaving for something important...

Less game, more movie:

Right. I didn't buy the game to watch a movie. I buy games so that I can immerse myself in a fantasy world for a few hours when I can. Fine for starting missions, short cutscene where you get your mission so you know what to do, and a little thing at the end of the mission, I can handle.... But to have 5 minutes of cutscenes thrown in after you turn a corner, or missions that need a full story told in cutscenes before it starts (GTA is bad for this) It's not needed. Just tell me what needs to be done.

Super-mega-ultra-celebrity voice acting:

It's pointless and it's going to blow the game budget waaaaay up. Instead of paying ONE actor $17 million to record a few lines... That $17 million could add in a lot of decent content and pay for an entire cast of voice actors. It is utterly pointless, I didn't buy GTA San Andreas cause Samuel L Jackson voiced a character.... I bought it cause I like the games. I do not give a flying **** who is doing the voices. It's a game... I remember when all you got was text on the screen and a very synthed up manical "MWUAH HA HA"

Where is my damned booklet?

Remember the good old days, when you got a booklet in your box, telling you some of the story, giving you the controls, a little info about weapons and characters you will encounter.... Yeah well that is now considered extra content and sold only in those waste of money collectors releases... You know the ones where you get two books and a figure but pay $150 more for the game.... Yeah... GIMMIE MY DAMNED BOOKLET!!!

Movie related cash ins....

Why are video games losing money? The dreaded Movie - video game cross overs... These do not work. For a HUGE part. Why? Because a movie has different requirements than a game. Plus to make it a truely authentic experience you basically have to do everything exactly as it happens in the movie, this gives players little control over the situation, and anyone that has seen the movie knows exactly what to do... Plus these games, because of the aforementioned points, usually end up being based very very very very loosely on the movie... Where you have a main character, a few bad guys and a bit of the plot with a ton of gameplay that has nothing to do with any of the action in the movie... and of course the obligatory car chase and underwater levels.... Just stop... Make a stand alone game, base it on the main character and build on their history. Movies like Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull had references to Indie's adventures that sounded waaaaaaaaay more interesting than the movie was... let's play those.

Highly censored R-rated games.

Hot Coffee was removed from GTA cause parents complained... Well the game is meant for MATURE gamers. If this is too graphic for your child THEY SHOULD NOT BE PLAYING THE GAME! Stop complaining to developers cause the obviously r-rated game you got for your 7 year old is full of violence and sex and drugs and torture and scary things.... BE A DECENT PARENT THEN AND DON'T BUY THESE GAMES FOR YOUR DAMNED KIDS! These ratings are there for a reason. To ensure the game is sold to the correct type of people. Stop ruining our enjoyment as adults cause your kid saw some computer generated boobs, or the scary monster makes them wet their bed at night...

Transport missions

You get a character that more or less wants to die, running right into gunfire as you, the only one with a gun and body armour, tries desperately to take the bad guys down while your charge's health is falling faster than something heavy falling from a really high hight. Give these NPC characters a little more self preservation AI please!

and my number one complaint about video games....

Other Gamers!

I don't play multiplayer because of other gamers. I, strangely, don't enjoy getting verbal abuse from some 12/13 year old who thinks they are hot *****. when all I can think is... eYzwyl5.jpg

Also I don't like getting sniped from some camper, repeatedly killed at spawn points, the obviously over powered guy who has apparently no life outside the game winning every single match.... Thats why I hated Watchdog... Here I am happily playing the main story when BOOM I have to find some other hacker or suddenly I am getting hunted down by some other player... Not my cup of tea. I also don't want to be planning my life around other people, just so we can all get together and do a raid or some other team based event. (Usually done at like 3 am for me) Or if you get the moron that doesn't do their job in the team, causing failure after failure cause they want to go get some pointless thing.. or find out whats up there... or dies 3 seconds in. Oh and the people that think EVERYONE has to play the way THEY play or else they are doing it wrong... Look, once the game is in my possession I will play the game how and as I want. If I want to cheat I will, if I want to make super armour in Skyrim I will. If it "ruins" the experience then fine I will replay the game without it.. But absolutely no one can tell me how and what I should do to play a game "the right way" there is no right way only the individual players way. If you are on the other side of the world, bitching at me cause my Skyrim Daedric armour has over powered health/stamina/magic buffs and has an armour value of 2 million and my weapons can do over a million damage... Who really needs help.? Play YOUR game and shut up.

And end rant
 
Jaggies.

Why do we still have them on ps4 and Xbox1?

All of the videos I saw of games like watchdogs looked SOO smooth and great.

Now that I have a ps4, I'm pretty let down that everything still looks sparkly like the ps1 2 and 3 did...

Uncharted and gta5 have the best graphics I've seen on the ps4.... But they were made for PS3 and just upgraded...

Where is the TRUE next gen console graphics?

Nothing STILL compares to half life 2 on a 15 year old PC... I don't get it...
 
I'd go with the fact that the game you buy is never complete, all the added stuff through DLC's and micro transactions. Not even mentioning the patches post release, damn is it so hard to test a game before releasing it. My Zelda on the 8-bit works better then all the games now :D
 
I'd go with the fact that the game you buy is never complete, all the added stuff through DLC's and micro transactions.

I'm sorry but in almost every instance, that is simply not the way it is no matter how many conspiracy theorists repeat it.

Like ANY product/project, a game is planned and a time/budget is set based on expected sales and return on investment. DLC is rarely defined until far into development, when there is a more clear idea on how the public will receive the base game. You also simply don't intentionally make decisions that you know is going to anger or likely drive away most of your customer base. (There are a lot of other reasons why it doesn't work that way but those are really enough.) I'm sure that somewhere, sometime, someone may have said "let's take that out and make it DLC instead" but it is NOT anywhere near the norm and this myth needs to just go away because all it does is create poisonous animosity between devs, publishers and gamers.



is it so hard to test a game before releasing it.

Yes, it is.

A modern game contains so many millions of elements in code, graphics and sound that all combine and create behaviors that can be impossible to even reproduce. Even with a couple hundred testers going at it for 12+ hours a day it can be hard to find all the bugs. The more complex and open-ended a game is, the worse it gets, because even with all the testing in the world, you can still have one person do something that no one else has thought of, that breaks the experience. Sure, there are cases of poor QA just as there are even more cases of good and thorough QA but overall, it's pretty incredible that modern software works as well as it does.

Think about this: everything that happens electronically is a combined series of on-off signals. Everything. On. Off. That's it. I think that we (including myself) often take the complexity of how it works for granted.


My Zelda on the 8-bit works better then all the games now :D

8-bit Zelda was infinitely more primitive than anything released today, or in the last 25 years. I love a lot of stone-age games too (Starflight 2 and Might and Magic 2 are a couple favorites), but beyond the rose-tint, the experiences you can have in modern gaming are beyond what could even be imagined back then.

One huge issue that gaming has is that technologically, it is still in it's infancy. When you compare to movies for example, the basic principle of the film camera (light passing through a lens to capture a moving image in some way) has not really changed that much in the last 100 years whereas gaming technology usually has to be remade from scratch every couple of years due to how quickly the world is advancing. Maybe in the future, once graphics are truly photo-realistic and systems are advanced enough to flawlessly mimic whatever behavior designers can come up with, we will start seeing a more stable artistic growth, but at present we are still in a mad (but thrilling) tech race that is full of unknowns and experimentation.
 
What I hate are PC games that insist on retaining the auto-save only function when ported over or is written with it in. One of the things I like about PC games over console games is that I can save wherever and whenever I want and not just where the devs want me to. To me, nothing is more frustrating than spending countless amounts of time to get past one particularly difficult section and then die shortly after passing it but because of there's no auto-save point right after you have to repeat the whole thing over again.

I don't know if this has been mentioned but I'm sure that everyone here hates how the big publishers like to push games out before they're truly done and simply patch them later because they feel they have to hit an arbitrary release date. I really wish that more companies would take the Blizzard (or is it Bioware) approach and take their time on a game and not release it until it's actually done and not just give us a half finished game with a massive patch to download once we install it.
 
Think about this: everything that happens electronically is a combined series of on-off signals. Everything. On. Off. That's it. I think that we (including myself) often take the complexity of how it works for granted.

Not me, man. I read The Diamond Age. :D




8-bit Zelda was infinitely more primitive than anything released today, or in the last 25 years. I love a lot of stone-age games too (Starflight 2 and Might and Magic 2 are a couple favorites), but beyond the rose-tint, the experiences you can have in modern gaming are beyond what could even be imagined back then.

This is absolutely true. If I took even an Xbox 360 back in time and showed it to myself in 1993, I would have been totally floored. Hell, if I showed myself what 1998 looked like gaming-wise to my 1993 self, I'd have been blown away.

One huge issue that gaming has is that technologically, it is still in it's infancy. When you compare to movies for example, the basic principle of the film camera (light passing through a lens to capture a moving image in some way) has not really changed that much in the last 100 years whereas gaming technology usually has to be remade from scratch every couple of years due to how quickly the world is advancing. Maybe in the future, once graphics are truly photo-realistic and systems are advanced enough to flawlessly mimic whatever behavior designers can come up with, we will start seeing a more stable artistic growth, but at present we are still in a mad (but thrilling) tech race that is full of unknowns and experimentation.

I get that, but I think that sometimes developers -- or publishers -- lose sight of the fact that all the whiz-bang graphical coolness in the world won't make for better core gameplay. The core gameplay has to be solid. Yet I can't help but wonder if the focus on things like reflective surfaces or rain pattering off of Batman's cape so that it looks wet naturally loses sight of the fact that the gameplay and story still need to be really good.

What I hate are PC games that insist on retaining the auto-save only function when ported over or is written with it in. One of the things I like about PC games over console games is that I can save wherever and whenever I want and not just where the devs want me to. To me, nothing is more frustrating than spending countless amounts of time to get past one particularly difficult section and then die shortly after passing it but because of there's no auto-save point right after you have to repeat the whole thing over again.

That kind of thing -- if I don't also have the option to manually save when I choose -- will make me uninstall a game and probably never buy another in the series (until I learn that the manual save feature has been added). Hell, we're at the point where there's literally no reason why you can't manually save in a console game, since consoles are practically just standardized PCs anyway.

I don't know if this has been mentioned but I'm sure that everyone here hates how the big publishers like to push games out before they're truly done and simply patch them later because they feel they have to hit an arbitrary release date. I really wish that more companies would take the Blizzard (or is it Bioware) approach and take their time on a game and not release it until it's actually done and not just give us a half finished game with a massive patch to download once we install it.

Yeah, that practice...sucks. Steam has also kind of enabled this for indie devs too, with their "Early Access" system.

I do not buy early access games. I'm not paying to beta test your ****ing game. You can pay ME to do it, or give it to me for free. But early access is a total scam, especially considering how many games end up stuck in early access development purgatory.
 
Less game, more movie:

Right. I didn't buy the game to watch a movie. I buy games so that I can immerse myself in a fantasy world for a few hours when I can. Fine for starting missions, short cutscene where you get your mission so you know what to do, and a little thing at the end of the mission, I can handle.... But to have 5 minutes of cutscenes thrown in after you turn a corner, or missions that need a full story told in cutscenes before it starts (GTA is bad for this) It's not needed. Just tell me what needs to be done.

This. So much this.
 
Games that have a ton of updates with each login. I understand the necessity of patching unforeseen problems - especially on a new release, but sometimes I just want to get a quick game in and find myself waiting for 10 minutes of updates.
 
I also have to agree with the whole First Person Shooter thing.

Ever since the days of Doom they have not changes a bit ... Well okay the graphics have, but that's about it. Okay you can sometimes get in a vehicle and shoot things... But really that's it. Call Of Duty, Battlefront, Destiny... It's all the same, run here.... pew pew pew.... run there... pew pew pew.... It's like those text based MMORPG games on the internet. Each one is exactly the same at it's core, just names of things are changed to make it suit the game's theme. No wonder people on the multiplayer are so angry...

That and the Sports games. FIFA comes out every year and not one thing has changed in football since the last one was out.... What exactly have they done different? Again changed some names around and shoved the exact same game as before down the consumers throats and said "Hey it's a brand new game, see it says 2016 on the box not 2015...." CAUSE THAT'S ALL THEY FRIGGIN CHANGE!!! and golf.... Golf has been exactly the same for hundreds of years, but EA Sports has to reinvent it every year cause...... REASONS! DOLLARS!!!

Oh and this I have to add....

This recent fad of watching people playing games online..... What the absolute F!!!! You want to watch someone play a game? WHY? Where is the entertainment in that? Play the friggin game yourself. Watching people play is fine... If at some point you will be handed a controller and you are involved as in; YOU ARE IN THE SAME ROOM as the people playing. But to watch some utter tw@ online drone on about moving over there... oh no am dead.... now i go over here i shot you .... please, that is the utter lowest form of entertainment there is. Like I said play the game yourself. At least you will feel some form of accomplishment. And there is that other game.. the zombie apocalypse game... I forget what it's called... I have a friend that watches that constantly... all I ever see is some guy running around a field checking his equipment every now and then.... In the days where we demand to be bombarded with CGI and big fantastical blockbusters in the cinema,. and bitch if it was poor quality... These people go home and watch someone play a computer game and say nonsense about it.... I say play, they mostly run around and do NOTHING!!!! People please use your time for something with more meaning. .... #savethelivingroom
 
I think the rise of Let's Play videos is really about the decline in pre-release demos.

It used to be you could try a game demo before you played. Then that stopped. Now your best bet if you want to "try before you buy" is to watch someone actually play and see if it looks ok to you. It's not a perfect representation, considering you can't see how the controls are manipulated and whether that's intuitive, but you can at least see if the game looks interesting beyond just some hype video released by the publisher that's probably not even gameplay footage.
 
noobs who dont have the slightest idea what they are doing: ow big NPC, lets just run towards it to have a better look............. heal you darn healer, heal ffs. raid wipes, noobs are pissed cause the healer didnt heal or tank didnt tank according to them (me, I tanked wow raids from getgo and my wife healed the same)
 
That doesn't explain why these people are making millions contributing nothing to society only ruining the next generation with their utter rubbish. That Pewtie Pew guy has made over $7,000,000 doing what? Sitting in a chair hitting buttons, Hell, the people serving you at McDonalds are contributing more to society than these people.

The only way you are going to know if you like a game is to actually play it. So rent a game if you are unsure about it...
 
I don't know if this has been mentioned but I'm sure that everyone here hates how the big publishers like to push games out before they're truly done and simply patch them later because they feel they have to hit an arbitrary release date. I really wish that more companies would take the Blizzard (or is it Bioware) approach and take their time on a game and not release it until it's actually done and not just give us a half finished game with a massive patch to download once we install it.

This is another common misconception. Yes, there are occasions when games DO get pushed out the door early (there were a couple big ones last year unfortunately) but on the whole, this practice is talked about more than it actually happens. Small groups of gamers like to make big noise online when something doesn't work. You can have a game that sells 10 million and a small group of people will have issues and make a lot of noise, which propagates and becomes "massively buggy". Sometimes it's not about "feeling" and "arbitrary" release dates- you either hit the date or go under. The trick is to have a game that is good enough, as good as can be by that date because missing the date can be disastrous. (Example, retailers and download outlets need certain dates set in STONE or you are screwed.) Developers are on the whole just as much at fault for bad or buggy releases- I've learned this firsthand from working on both sides of the fence. Sometimes it's a very fine line as to what is "good enough" or bug-free enough. This again depends on the nature of the product. A cookie-cutter game with zero innovation in either tech or aesthetics, done by an established studio, should be expected to have less bugs than a hugely complex title with gameplay that is innovative or revolutionary and made by a small startup.

There are a couple dev houses out there (such as Blizzard) that can take forever to release a game, because frankly, they don't need to profit from them at all for the foreseeable future. The amount of capital they already have will allow them to develop in infinity just by living off the interest alone! The rest of the developers and publishers in the world simply can't compete with that. It's just not possible.

I get that, but I think that sometimes developers -- or publishers -- lose sight of the fact that all the whiz-bang graphical coolness in the world won't make for better core gameplay. The core gameplay has to be solid. Yet I can't help but wonder if the focus on things like reflective surfaces or rain pattering off of Batman's cape so that it looks wet naturally loses sight of the fact that the gameplay and story still need to be really good.....

Yeah, that practice...sucks. Steam has also kind of enabled this for indie devs too, with their "Early Access" system.

I do not buy early access games. I'm not paying to beta test your ****ing game.

Re: graphics
Well, the (sad) truth is that for certain types of games, you MUST be cutting edge to even be considered a player or get exposure. I've never been much of a graphics-guy myself but there is a HUGE number of people out there that are and will KILL a title by word-of-mouth if certain expected standards are not met.

Another thing i also kinda feel is that "core gameplay" IS often pretty solid from veteran developers. A LOT more so than in past times. But we as gamers (again, myself included) have grown used to it and become slightly entitled in that when certain things don't meet our (modern) refined palettes it's easier to complain. As costs go, design isn't THAT expensive but it IS a matter of taste (as well as high-risk in terms of what people will like... it's easy to underestimate one little feature that can ruin things for you). It's also very hard to find really competent designers that don't either have delusions of grandeur or would rather be in Hollywood directing films.

Re: early access:
I agree with not expecting your customer base for you BUT there are in fact a LOT of people that actually enjoy being a part of the process and for a small indie developer with zero money, having the community help test your project can sometimes be the only option. (The smart ones USUALLY give boons to early-adopters. Those that don't are quick to feel the wrath of the disgruntled!)

I just want to get a quick game in and find myself waiting for 10 minutes of updates.

I feel that pain. It seems to have gotten a lot better with modern consoles (my PS4 often lets me play without updating) plus you can always run things like Steam offline...

This recent fad of watching people playing games online..... What the absolute F!!!! You want to watch someone play a game? WHY? Where is the entertainment in that?
While I personally have no interest in e-sports, why is it a less valid form of entertainment than watching physical sports, or chess, or poker? They all require skill and can contain the drama of "what happens next". The arguments you give about feeling accomplishment applies to those as well. An arthouse relationship drama is no less valid a film than Furious 7- they are just different and appeal to different, but equally valid, tastes.

If you're referring to "let's play" videos, those can be immensely helpful in areas such as general games research, to quickly find out specific things about different games and so on.
 
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That doesn't explain why these people are making millions contributing nothing to society only ruining the next generation with their utter rubbish. That Pewtie Pew guy has made over $7,000,000 doing what? Sitting in a chair hitting buttons, Hell, the people serving you at McDonalds are contributing more to society than these people.

The only way you are going to know if you like a game is to actually play it. So rent a game if you are unsure about it...

There are lots of forms of entertainment that I don't enjoy. Does that invalidate them? Of course not. I may think they are the dumbest things ever devised but if someone likes them, who am I to tell them not to (as long as other beings are not being hurt or illegal things going on). One could make an argument about all the supporter violence Soccer generates, compared to what those online celebs do. Which is better, which should we allow to exist?

You can't rent all games. In fact, you can't actually rent the majority of games that exist.
 
That doesn't explain why these people are making millions contributing nothing to society only ruining the next generation with their utter rubbish. That Pewtie Pew guy has made over $7,000,000 doing what? Sitting in a chair hitting buttons, Hell, the people serving you at McDonalds are contributing more to society than these people.

The only way you are going to know if you like a game is to actually play it. So rent a game if you are unsure about it...

I kind of agree with you, but apparently he's good at it. I'd rather see this guy make that than giving the Kardashians another show! Kim is a basically a pornstar, but since she doesn't actually call herself that, so she gets to be a big celebrity. I doubt any real pornstar would get that much respect to have a whole show about her family! At least the pornstar is honest about what she does.

I kind of agree about the multiplayer games. I've only played Battlefield 3 and 4 recently. I would call myself above average, but I also get frustrated when there are extremely good players on. We used to play on a server where Xfactor (pro gamer, but he seems like a nice guy) played on and he would kill you instantly if he saw you first. I would literally be thinking "OH SH!@ Xfact...." dead. :lol
 
The only streamers i watch are the guys at Rooster Teeth being horrible to each other in pvp games i would never play, Funhaus which i'm tired of for bashing indie developers all the time and breaking vintage games, and Daz Black because he's funny and a good guy in general and he does more than gaming. Oh and I watch Ray Jr who used to work for Rooster Teeth because he plays a lot of online party games that are funny and he's a good guy. Pew Pew is about as entertaining as a prostate exam and lasts 3x longer.
 
I don't mind cutscenes, unless they are 30 min long or you cannot skip them.

I hate it when "Quick Time Effect" action cues are used almost as much as regular game play like in QTE: the game, I mean Resident Evil 6.

It doesn't bother me when it's used to finish off a boss but when I have to frequently use it during normal gameplay it gets old, real quick.
 
Especially when you've used the QT controls a dozen times before in the game and can pretty much figure them out or make it an option to turn them off. In this day and age there's no reason cutscenes shouldn't be able to be skipped, especially if you're playing game+ or some mode.
 
Cutscenes. I hate cutscenes. **** the "cinematic experience"; I play a game to play a game.
As a sometime game scriptwriter, I hate them too. (I've even directed them as well as taught developers how to do them "properly".)

Solos blaster;3871439 I hate it when "Quick Time Effect" action cues are used almost as much as regular game play like in QTE[/QUOTE said:
My highly personal opinion is that designers that willingly resort to QTEs need to be kicked in the shins until they agree to not.
 
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