Most annoying non-obvious things in modern gaming

[PorkyThePaladin]

What are the things that annoy you the most about modern gaming, if we exclude the obvious stuff that we've been ranting about forever here?

Obvious stuff to avoid:
- Games being dumbed down to least common denominator
- Cross-platform games
- DLCs
- Loot boxes
- Map markers/quest compasses

For me, off the top of my head:

- Single player games syncing with central server - this is really annoying, it started for me with From Software games, which always had it, but now so many games have it. Not only do they do it when you enter tha menu after launching the game, but they always do it when you try to shut down the gaming application. What do they do that shit for, I don't have cloud saves enabled, what the fuck do they need to check a central server for when I am trying to leave? So fucking aggravating.
- Remasters - we have entered the age of the remaster. Games that you can play just fine with a few patches/Gog edition, or in some cases even with Steam now are getting remaster versions, like a plague. This is such a blatant misuse of industry resources. There are barely any good games coming out and these morons are using personnel and money to remake a perfectly fine game that everybody can already play.
- Way too frequent gay options during dialogue in RPGs and the like - Now look, I am totally fine with gay people, so this is not against them, but they are a minority of the population, and you can easily go through life as a guy without ever having a gay guy come on to you. But in modern RPGs, you routinely get gay guys flirting with you left and right. What's bad about that is when it happens that often, it hurts other types of relationships that men can have with each other. Like in some games, you work together with another dude, and you could have a nice bonding moment of friendship, but with all these gay options now, you are kinda paranoid as a player, and thinking is this guy trying to fuck me in the ass? I've noticed I am playing every kind of a friendly dialogue with another dude in games very defensively now, just in case. Which is dumb.

 

[HansDampf]

Bad anti-aliasing.

 

[somerandomdude]

Early access. If you want me to play test your bug ridden shit game and give feedback, then you should be paying me, or at least let me demo it for free.

 

[Machocruz]

-Cheap looking 3D assets in sequels/remakes of formerly 2D/sprite games
-'Games as service' aesthetic. NuDoom and NuDiablo have ads or some shit on their title screen. Most AAA UI looks like it came from your new tablet, no matter the theme or setting of the game. Immersion or setting the mood no longer a concern
-The trend of having to hold a button down to interact with something while a circle fills up

 

[Falksi]

Bad pacing. Just played through RE8 and, whilst it was only 10-ish hours long, the amount of bloat it still contained really hurt the experience. It would have been an awesome 5-6 hour game. And that brings me to....

Ammo for standard weapons in action-based games. Who the fuckinghell thought this was a good idea wants fucking with a wire brush. Hunting around for replacement ammo is THE biggest waste of time in gaming. 30 years ago we could just play the game, but now we have to fanny about with stupid basics in order to do so. I'm fine with ammo for power-ups or special weapons, and item hunting does have it's place, but when I play games which have you lose hours on just getting the basics in place to actually play then I want to shoot the devs. Worst culprit for this was Mass Effect 2. I loved ME1's heat-synch system, all the constraints to make combat good, but not off the fanny-arseing around. So they go and flush it down the shitter o pad the whole game out. Gay as fuck.

 

[Lemming42]

I don't like how slick and smooth movement tends to be in newer games. Every character you play as these days is an Olympian-level athlete with superhuman reflexes, even if the story alleges that you're a normal person.

One of those cases where a lower level of technical fidelity and a higher level of experimentation in previous eras of gaming turned out to retrospectively be an advantage - compare Mafia (2002) with Mafia: Definitive Edition for an obvious example. Mafia's combat isn't great, but you really feel like a regular adult man with no special skills and no impressive acrobatic abilities, a bit clunky and heavy in your movements, your "dodge roll" more of a last-resort stumble than a smooth maneuver. Your aim was also not precise. In the remake, you're sprinting at light speed, sliding around, popping in and out of cover so fast that it's a wonder you don't get whiplash, and so on, plus you have perfect aim. The result is that you feel not like a man but more like a demigod, identical to every other game on the market.

Tomb Raider's another obvious instance - say what you will about the PS1 TR's movement system, but you feel like an actual person with a physical presence in the world; you can feel your weight in each jump, and the consistency of the movement rules mean that you know your body's limitations, as an actual real-life acrobat would. In the new ones (new meaning Legend onwards) you just float around at top speed with no sense of heaviness or restriction, magnetising to random shit, the result being that you barely feel like you physically exist in the game world at all, and the games become indistinguishable from the hundreds of other games using similar movement mechanics.

 

[anvi]

They skimp on content, Early Access or not they have no way near enough content. I think the biggest problem is young people being retarded and easily pleased, buying shitty games and supporting shitty business practices.

Also fake reviews are a big problem. If it wasn't bad enough that most gamers are easily pleased simpletons but they are also easily manipulated and the world is full of fake reviews and reddit bots etc.

Lack of compression / skill. Indie games sometimes but AAA games usually. I saw they crept up to about 150GB+ these days, it's so obnoxious.

Too many shit little indie games. It is harder to find the 0.1% of games that are good when each day brings 10000 new releases.

The raping of the industry by corporations (see my sig) has left the few big AAA corporate shitlords and then a million one man indie devs all making shit worse than we had in the 1980s.

The destruction of buying games in stores is a problem too. People used to stand in a room surrounded by games on walls and pick whatever they felt like. Now they are fed a short list of the HOT NEW RELEASES on Steam or whatever, and it stops people finding games and makes all the shit companies who hit advertising hard the ones that usually succeed.

Shitty young people. They get mentioned twice because they are so shitty. This time because they contribute to the decline with their stupid comments online. It's ok to be retarded as a kid, that's what being a kid is. But at least in my day most of us knew it, so would shut the fuck up around adults. With other kids fine, but no kid would argue with an adult. Now if I want to tell some developer what I think is wrong with the game, I have to face this army of pitbull fanboy kids who rage at someone for h8ting on the game they like. It's infuriating, so I don't bother trying to give anyone feedback anymore. Fuck them all. Only the result now is this world full of clueless prick children bandwagoning with bots to dominate discussions online.

 

[Squidhead]

Just half-baked games relying on dlc to feed their devs.

 

[deuxhero]

Removal of male/female selection in favor of "body type" shit.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

- Save files placed in a random windows folder

- Bad UI despite decades of examples to copy from

- Respecing is hard or impossible. If you want your decisions to have "weight", just lean over the keyboard with your huge gut and allocate your points that way

- Orchestral soundtracks often start with a few seconds of silence and it's hard to focus on the story when I can hear my wife and her boyfriend in the oher room

 

[dreughjiggers]

Early access. If you want me to play test your bug ridden shit game and give feedback, then you should be paying me, or at least let me demo it for free.

This. And if a large team can't publish after 4 years of development, axe the fuckers. There's no need for large teams, or unfinished AAA pieces of shit.

 

[markec]

I hate when a game gets "full" release, you go "Finally Im going to play the full and not some early access version of the game!" and in announcement is a roadmap for the next decade to add features that should be in from the start.

 

[Dadd]

I don't like slick "modern" sound effects in medieval fantasy games.

 

[ds]

Biggest annoyance for me lately is non-interactive cutscenes that could have been gameplay. You don't have to go full Half-Life but I wish developers at least thought about alternatives before taking control away from the player. And don't even think adding QTEs to your cutscenes makes this better.

Also cutscenes where your character acts completely inconsistently with the gameplay. If you need to make the player character act like a weakling/idiot or otherwise in a way that the player never would for your story to work then your story is shit.

Then there's a ton of games that only support 16:9 aspect ratios. Unity games seem to be especially bad about this. You'd think that having already moved from 4:3 to 16:9 developers would have learned to at least letterbox their shit if they can't be bothered to work it properly at arbitrary resolutions.

 

[randir14]

When clicking "quit" brings you back to the main menu instead of quitting the game.

 

[Slaver1]

Fed up to the core with the millions of indie games raining from the sky in a never-ending cascading shitstorm and splattering all over the PC platform. Instead of a million midwits working on a million equally disposable games it would be nice to see a few decent sized teams working together to stand out from the despicable pack with a bit of dignity and make something they can genuinely be proud of.

 

[Norfleet]

- Single player games syncing with central server

That's not non-obvious, that's painfully glaring. If the moment I try to start up the game, it immediately sets off security alerts on my firewall, I can't say this was non-obvious. Even MMOs are not this blatant, because when an MMO trips the network alarm, at least it directly corresponds with an action I have taken or is being displayed to me. With a single player game doing it, you don't see any reason for this to happen and suddenly WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP. You think I just allow random things to connect to the Internet at will? NO. Every network access needs a full audit here.

When clicking "quit" brings you back to the main menu instead of quitting the game.

I don't ever actually click "quit" because it pretty much never does it. If I've already saved, and I push quit, I want it to quit NOW. Not spin around doing godknowswhat. This is such an ongoing nuisance that I rigged a "kill current process" hotkey on my computer and use it basically anytime I want to quit something. I'm not going to wait for it to slowly decide how it wants to quit. I'm just going to kill it. No fancy quit screen transitions. No credits scene. You die now. If I tell a program to quit, I want it to fall over dead immediately like it was shot in the head.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

- Single player games syncing with central server

That's not non-obvious, that's painfully glaring. If the moment I try to start up the game, it immediately sets off security alerts on my firewall, I can't say this was non-obvious. Even MMOs are not this blatant, because when an MMO trips the network alarm, at least it directly corresponds with an action I have taken or is being displayed to me. With a single player game doing it, you don't see any reason for this to happen and suddenly WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP. You think I just allow random things to connect to the Internet at will? NO. Every network access needs a full audit here.

When clicking "quit" brings you back to the main menu instead of quitting the game.

I don't ever actually click "quit" because it pretty much never does it. If I've already saved, and I push quit, I want it to quit NOW. Not spin around doing godknowswhat. This is such an ongoing nuisance that I rigged a "kill current process" hotkey on my computer and use it basically anytime I want to quit something. I'm not going to wait for it to slowly decide how it wants to quit. I'm just going to kill it. No fancy quit screen transitions. No credits scene. You die now. If I tell a program to quit, I want it to fall over dead immediately like it was shot in the head.

Yeah, sometimes if I am not in the mood, once the whole "syncing with server" bullshit starts when I am trying to exit the game, I just minimize it to desktop and right click and end it.

 

[NecroLord]

What are the things that annoy you the most about modern gaming

Everything.

 

[flyingjohn]

I hate when a game gets "full" release, you go "Finally Im going to play the full and not some early access version of the game!" and in announcement is a roadmap for the next decade to add features that should be in from the start.

I hate this so much. Paradox and its 10+ years of dlc and questionable patches.
Other companies also are annoying with constant updates and random dlc announcements.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

What are the things that annoy you the most about modern gaming, if we exclude the obvious stuff that we've been ranting about forever here?

Obvious stuff to avoid:
- Games being dumbed down to least common denominator
- Cross-platform games
- DLCs
- Loot boxes
- Map markers/quest compasses

For me, off the top of my head:

- Single player games syncing with central server - this is really annoying, it started for me with From Software games, which always had it, but now so many games have it. Not only do they do it when you enter tha menu after launching the game, but they always do it when you try to shut down the gaming application. What do they do that shit for, I don't have cloud saves enabled, what the fuck do they need to check a central server for when I am trying to leave? So fucking aggravating.
- Remasters - we have entered the age of the remaster. Games that you can play just fine with a few patches/Gog edition, or in some cases even with Steam now are getting remaster versions, like a plague. This is such a blatant misuse of industry resources. There are barely any good games coming out and these morons are using personnel and money to remake a perfectly fine game that everybody can already play.
- Way too frequent gay options during dialogue in RPGs and the like - Now look, I am totally fine with gay people, so this is not against them, but they are a minority of the population, and you can easily go through life as a guy without ever having a gay guy come on to you. But in modern RPGs, you routinely get gay guys flirting with you left and right. What's bad about that is when it happens that often, it hurts other types of relationships that men can have with each other. Like in some games, you work together with another dude, and you could have a nice bonding moment of friendship, but with all these gay options now, you are kinda paranoid as a player, and thinking is this guy trying to fuck me in the ass? I've noticed I am playing every kind of a friendly dialogue with another dude in games very defensively now, just in case. Which is dumb.

If you don't want Souls games to sync with the main server, just make them start in offline mode. You can do so from the main menu. I think only DS2 will always try to sync with the main server. These games come like this by default because they have lots of online-only features, not only PVP. Yet, they do not have cloud saves on Steam, which sucks.

Remasters happen because games are console centric. Most of the times, games aren't just backwards compatible with past systems. Game development is also getting slower than the avverage console lifecycle, so you'll end up with a modern system and no games to play (like it has been happening with the PS3 onwards). Remasters are then a marketing tactic to have more games readily available for a system while the rest of the games end their development cycles.

Gays are over represented in media because western media is America-centric, and when you don't explicitly say you're in favor of a certain thing, it must mean you're against it. The gay or even black thing in games arenn't even close to the first time this has happened and it's really just an american problem.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

What I dislike is that it feels like a lot of modern games have no idea how to make content. You either get a 6 hour borderline movie or a 80 hour open world game with copy/pasted content and there's basically no in-between. People need to figure out how to make a short experience that feels like it benefits from being a game or an open world game that's scaled down to the point where it being open world is actually a benefit rather than a curse. Really, the more open-ended level design from the PS2 generation is what the latter should be striving for.

 

[ferratilis]

-I hate that white jizz they put in places where you're supposed to climb/interact. I'm not fucking retarded, let me find it on my own.
-When a new game starts automatically without letting you tweak your settings first. Or even worse, you have to look at five different company logos and an unskippable cinematic before the game starts.
-Forced "walk and chat" sequences where you're forced to walk at a snail's pace, in a straight line, while some dumbass NPC is telling you something inconsequential.
-Constantly taking control of the camera to show the player a setpiece or something important. The biggest sign of a poorly designed game.
-If a game that is on Steam requires an additional launcher to be installed, I'm not buying it. Goodbye EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar etc.

 

[JarlFrank]

-The trend of having to hold a button down to interact with something while a circle fills up

I hate that shit, it's so annoying, especially in games where you have to do it a lot.

Operating some types of switches, harvesting berries or other resources, etc.
There's some indie Elder Scrolls-ish game with a big focus on resource collection and crafting, which I generally don't like, but I'd be willing to put up with it as long as it's not too annoying.
Sadly, the game makes it extremely annoying to harvest things by making me hold down the key until a little circle is filled.

Why can't I just hit the key once and the harvesting is done? It's not like it adds anything to the gameplay.

(just checked, game name is Windscape)

 

[Lagole Gon]

Too abstract/arbitrary/nonsensical mechanics, especially item stats.

It's a pet peeve of mine.