Little things, in great games, that annoyed the shit out of you

More of a design/narrative thread than interface/technical one.

Sure, I can probably think of ton of them, but the one that first comes to mind is in Gothic 2 Night of the Raven. With a flawless core game, and being a terrific expansion, there are little things NotR does wrong - except recruiting characters to crew your ship near the end game.

What is, in my opinion, the perfect climax of the game and my teh_highlight of the series - gathering your bros to fuck up sum nasty dragons (and we all know Gothic 1 and 2 are actually about fighting evil with the power of bros) is untouched in NotR, which is nothing less than disappointing since the expansion introduced so many new bros. While Cavalorn is being the prime example, making Greg the captain would be nothing less than epic, and, while its a quite incredible stretch narrative-wise, I'd sell both my kidneys to make Thorus guard the ship entrance.

 

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When you create 4 characters in Stellar Tactics and then they all die after the tutorial.

 

Dumb humor in Fallout 2.

 

Physical obstacles (e.g. makeshift barricades, chest-high walls, etc) that look like they can be easily overcome with a bit of finesse, but which you can't in-game, just because. I've been spoilt by PnP RPGs.

 

Edit: Barnabas disagrees with this, so I assume he really liked to gather his party before venturing forth a lot

 

"Behold, you stand before Strelok, the greatest Stalker in all of the Zone. I have killed controllers, pseudogiants, and chimeras by the dozen. Bandits fear me, mercenaries avoid me, the military hates me. But they cannot kill me. Nothing can stop me. Even the dreaded brain scorcher could not hold me back from reaching the centre of the Zone. I have seen things other stalkers can only dream of, and have artifacts worth more than their weight in gold. I ha- Wait, is that a single piece of barbed-wire strung between 2 wooden posts? Woe is me, for I am undone."

 

The medallion view in TW3, having to run around with that enabled most of the time to not miss stuff was really aggravating.

 

Every time I had to enter combat in a certain Troika game.

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That kind of stuff is in quite a few games, too.
Always annoying to have a beautiful game in front of you but you can't see it because the screen is plastered with symbols, dots, covered in gresyscale sludge or fake infrared for most of the game because the designers decided to practically litter shitty loot all over or make clues impossible or at least too difficult to find among the detailed foliage.

 

Twitcher 3, the map and quest menus being on separate tabs, and only one quest can be active at a time. Constantly having to switch between the two while tracking side quests is infuriating. Even fucking Skyrimjobs and it's awful, awful UI allows you to have multiple quest markers on the map screen, argh!

Mutated into "You can't rest so soon after exerting yourself" in the NWN games.

 

The Eggplant Wizard in Kid Icarus.

Seriously, fuck that guy.

Zep--

 

Oh yeah, almost forgot about these guys:

 

Picture this: You're playing your favourite third-person RPG. The villain waits at the end of a long rectangular room. You slowly and purposely walk forward, the sound of your footsteps echoing off the walls of the chamber exuding an air of intimidation. This is it, the climatic showdown. Finally you will avenge the wrongs perpetrated by this monste- wait, what's that sound? Oh no. There's a jumbled mess of footsteps behind you. Your companions are not designed to walk and insist on covering the few inches of empty space between you and them with a Mo Farah run. Your cheeks burn red with embarrassment at the utterly ridiculous scene. The villain's expression remains unchanged, but in his eyes you sense amusement, and worse, pity. You renew your promise to kill this man not because he's threatening the world, but so he can never tell anyone what transpired here.

 

Almost forgot about aliens shooting through walls and corners in Xenonauts. This still pisses me off so bad that I can't finish what is otherwise a really fun game.

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The Witcher 3, not being able to jump while in combat. A few times I fell down a ledge and had to track around it for what felt like forever.

 

The flying, seemingly playerseeking exploding cottage rooftops in Cannon Fodder.

Game wouldn't be the same without them, though.

 

I got stuck on the latest Tex Murphy games thanks to one of these. Gave up after a while.

 

Not being able to run or accelerate sideways and backwards in practically any modern first-person shooters. The last game I played that had that must have been Half-Life 2. The developers probably believe it's more realistic to allow the player to only run straight, but that makes no sense, since a person can run straight while looking and pointing their weapon to the side. If they're right-handed, they will have to shoot rightward with one arm. The accuracy will be reduced, but when you're running the accuracy is reduced anyway. And it doesn't matter anyway, since most of these shooters automatically lower the gun when you run. It doesn't even have to be a run when I'm moving backwards with Left Shift, but I want a little bit of acceleration, so that I can look around me without stopping and turning all the time. It just feels more natural.

 

In my first playthrough of Dark Souls, I got past these bowmen without dying.

 

Those electro daemons was much worse.

 

I hate how unbalanced and easy it is to min max in fallout 1, once you know your shit it's hard to create characters with different builds if you found the most efficient build for all playthroughs. I don't even think it's entirely the games fault but more of the stats shouldn't be considered useless.

Needs sawyer'd up a bit.

 

Tend to agree about that on Fallout, I usually end up having to go full roleplayer mode and put my own restrictions in (the traits do a good job at keeping you to this) in order to get some enjoyment out of it on the nth playthrough because generally the classic Small Guns/Lockpick/Speech build can just get you through the game with ease every time and is arguably the overpowered all-rounder build. The fact that you don't encounter even shitty energy weapons or big guns (give me a broken-ass ww1 lmg that does shit damage compared to later ones or something) until mid-lateway through both Fallout and Fallout 2 makes building around those kinds of weapons specifically from the start lead to combat being a chore and you'll want to go straight into tagging Small Guns for the early-mid game every time. There's just no sense of progression within the weapon categories outside of Small Guns. With Energy Weapons and especially Big Guns you can usually get the best shit around the same time you're getting the worst shit in their respective categories, with maybe a very little rampup towards the end of each game (upgrading to the Turbo Plasma Rifle in Fallout 1, buying Vindicators or finding Pulse Rifles around San Francisco in Fallout 2). This stuff is less of a problem in Fallout Tactics because your starting character build can be built specifically for the early game and you can hire mercs for other weapons or builds later on as you start to encounter that type of weaponry.

Shouldn't really complain too much though since this element is still handled way better than in Fallout 3 or 4 where you can max all skills in a single playthrough and wield every weapon effectively on every build, all while fooling the masses into thinking you're a deep RPG because your Big Gun does 1% more damage for each skill point you invest in Big Guns.

 

Shortage of gender pronouns in Mass Effect Andromeda

 

The Morrowind Alchemy menu is one of the most annoying things in a video game that I have encountered. So fucking tedious.

 

The first time I played Morrowind with loads of mods, I was amazed that I couldn't mod out at least the horizontal ingredient selection menu