Most annoying non-obvious things in modern gaming

[JarlFrank]

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.

The worst part for games like Paradox games and Total War is that they've always been heavily moddable, and the constant patching and new DLC releases keeps breaking old mods.

At some point, many mod creators stop updating their mods for the most recent version because they retired from the scene.

Just look at the amount of mods in the Steam Workshop for your average Paradox game, or for Rome 2 Total War, where the latest user comments are "Does this work on the most recent version??" and the answer is "No, creator abandoned the mod, it crashes when you try to load it."

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Hold to interact is most likely done due to how controllers now have pressure sensitive buttons. This way, it gives some room for the player to make human mistakes without having the character do things the player didn't wanted them to do. You might say "this wasn't a problem when I was a kid" and you are right, because controllers weren't that precise before. Now, they are.

 

[Kabas]

Lore
Or more precisely the sheer amount of it and how it is delivered nowadays.
Plot that is clearly written by someone who didn't make much success as a novelist. NPCs suffering from verbal diarrhea. All these long audo logs and in-game notes with paragraphs upon paragraphs of information about the fictional world you couldn't care about for the love of god.

Became obvious after playing the older games like the first Diablo or Zanzarah The Hidden portal.

 

[Dadd]

Characters' arms that dangle when they stop walking/running. When characters start moving after a delay when you command them to move.

 

[Ezekiel]

Hold to interact is most likely done due to how controllers now have pressure sensitive buttons. This way, it gives some room for the player to make human mistakes without having the character do things the player didn't wanted them to do. You might say "this wasn't a problem when I was a kid" and you are right, because controllers weren't that precise before. Now, they are.

I wish mainstream controllers still had pressure sensitive buttons, like up to the DualShock 3. Only the triggers are.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Hold to interact is most likely done due to how controllers now have pressure sensitive buttons. This way, it gives some room for the player to make human mistakes without having the character do things the player didn't wanted them to do. You might say "this wasn't a problem when I was a kid" and you are right, because controllers weren't that precise before. Now, they are.

I wish mainstream controllers still had pressure sensitive buttons, like up to the DualShock 3. Only the triggers are.

Front buttons have some degree of pressure sensibility too, not as much as the triggers, but they do. It's more noticeable when you are not playing with a mainstream controller, actually.

 

[Ezekiel]

Hold to interact is most likely done due to how controllers now have pressure sensitive buttons. This way, it gives some room for the player to make human mistakes without having the character do things the player didn't wanted them to do. You might say "this wasn't a problem when I was a kid" and you are right, because controllers weren't that precise before. Now, they are.

I wish mainstream controllers still had pressure sensitive buttons, like up to the DualShock 3. Only the triggers are.

Front buttons have some degree of pressure sensibility too, not as much as the triggers, but they do. It's more noticeable when you are not playing with a mainstream controller, actually.

They don't. Maybe you are talking about tactility. I have PS4, X360, Steam, Switch Pro, Gamecube and 8bitDo Ultimate controllers, and none of them have pressure sensitive buttons that can be used for analog actions in games.

 

[Ravielsk]

The worst part for games like Paradox games and Total War is that they've always been heavily moddable, and the constant patching and new DLC releases keeps breaking old mods.

Nah, the worst part is that the Paradox games pretty much sabotage the mods themselves. The things that usually cause mods to cease functioning between patches are not some huge overhauls that fundamentally change how the game works but minor tweaks to how the scripting works. For example just from what I know of Stellaris the way you list out modifiers for traits has changed at least three times since 2.2. The function they perform is the same just the script itself has been subtly changed. Same goes for ship speeds. They used to be listed in one txt file as concrete numbers you could reference but now they changed it all to "default" with the value default represent being hidden away in some other file.

The end result is a incompatibility caused by a total of three lines of code that need to be slightly rewritten but good luck finding out which lines they are if your mod does more than one single thing. Its almost deliberate in how they do it but only almost because due to how much they fucked the base game with the 2.2 patch its almost inevitable.

 

[Tyranicon]

Non-toggable motion blur.

 

[JarlFrank]

All these long audo logs and in-game notes with paragraphs upon paragraphs of information about the fictional world you couldn't care about for the love of god.

Not just that: most of the into is stuff you will never experience in the game. Morrowind had a lot of lore in its books, and a good portion of it referred to places you could actually find or people you could actually talk to (especially Vivec).

A lot of DEEP LORE games these days dump pages upon pages of lore on you, but it all concerns places you'll never see and people you'll never meet. It's completely divorced from the game you're actually playing.

 

[Vlajdermen]

I think most new games are given more production value then they know what to do with.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

My take on lore-dumps is only do it if you are SURE you have great writers. If you do, it works. Witcher games, CP2077, KCD, Disco Elysium all had a ton of dialogue but it was interesting to follow for the most part.

If you don't have great writers, stick to the Piranha Bytes way, keep shit short and to the point. Then it can also work well.

The problem is, most modern RPG studios combine shitty writers with tons of lore dumps. Blah blah blah blah...

 

[Great Deceiver]

All of the decline elements are extremely obvious, and they're all ubiquitous.

 

[PapaPetro]

Tutorials. Feels so forced at the start of every game.
I miss reading the manuals and just learning shit on my own.

 

[Naraya]

Streamlining evvverything. I hate this word with a passion.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

- Respecing is hard or impossible.

??
How is this a bad thing?

 

[Norfleet]

When characters start moving after a delay when you command them to move.

Mushy, unresponsive controls isn't SPECIFICALLY a modern-game thing, but the increasing use of animations in games has definitely made it worse, and is frequently the cause of this, as the character is stuck in a canned animation loop that can't be aborted, blended, or otherwise stopped.

 

[pickmeister]

Tutorials by dumping a fuckton of long-ass notes on the player. Nothing gets me excited to play a game with super original mechanics as getting through several walls of text before even playing the game. And once I get to playing I don't even remember shit from those notes.
I remember many games doing it "Click this. Click that. Now you know how to do this. Now fuck off and play our game.". What's so difficult about that?

When the game assumes that I care about the story, world, and characters from the very beginning.
I don't. It's your job to make me care, motherfucker.

Exposition, exposition, exposition. While talking as slow as possible to make it more theatrical. But instead of theatrical, it sounds retarded.
Make it shorter. I still don't care!

Voice actors trying their deepest voice they can.
Act normal, you sound like you got Down syndrome, idiot.

Way too energetic soundtracks that stress me the fuck out and keep my attention away from actually playing the game.
I blame game directors for this. Back in the day, developers more often treated audio as a moodsetter.

Every game trying to have original mechanics, while in reality it just uses different names for the stuff we've seen before and makes it only more convoluted.
Fucker just call it what it is and stop reinventing the wheel.

Cartoon graphics. Everything now looks like League of Legends or a comic book.
That shit makes me automatically dislike the game. I miss sprite graphics.
The same applies for cinematics (trailers, cutscenes, what have you) in a comic book style. Baldur's Gate EE remade cinematics are the perfect example of this.

Abstract/scuffed graphics style like Valheim. I refuse to play it until someone comes up with graphical overhaul.
Shit makes my eyes water.

Characters breathing by moving their whole body like they have only one lung and just finished their first 5K run.

Retarded movement like the way rogue is shooting in Diablo 4. It's not cool, practical, or even historical. She looks like an ape with a stick.
This is not new but happens more frequently these days.

The way released games are unfinished. I remember buying a box of game, playing it no problem, and only years later I read on the internet there were patches for bugs I never encountered.
These days the games come out and I have to wait two years for the developers to fix them and put in the shit that was supposed to be there at launch.

Illogical overuse of women.
Even my wife rolled her eyes when she saw the female guard captain in Expeditions: Conquistador right at the beginning.

"Thank you for purchasing our game with your hard earned real life money. It means so much to us. Now, be so kind and register for your free account you don't need so we can spam your email and sell your data."

Modern sounding English in historical settings. I hate it when ancient Greeks or whatever talk like the dev's favorite streamers.
I loved what the Spartacus show did to make English sound old but you don't even have to go that far. Just using proper English would be great as a start.

The fact that most devs don't even get their paycheck unless their game by some coincidence hits Twitch main page.

 

[LukePCS]

- When the armors are all over-the-top: always-shiny, with overly-intricate embroidery and golf-ball sized gleaming colorful gems...
- NPCs that you just know their whole personality right from their very first line of dialogue. "Hey, I'm a quirky tomboy girl who's probably a lesbian!" "I'm the strong silent type." and so on...
- Forcing interactivity in movie-like games with quick time events.
- How every year now there is a new "souls-like" release, with "souls-like" atmosphere (ooh, it's so dark and oppressive), "souls-like" aesthetics and "souls-like" mechanics.

 

[Ol' Willy]

The graphics in modern gaymes... the fidelity and technical quality increased a lot, but the result itself most often looks boring and bland, plastic, lifeless, devoid of style. Combined with the particular style of animation most of modern games use, this looks outright repulsive to me. I can't watch the footage from these games, let alone play them.

 

[KateMicucci]

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.

The worst part for games like Paradox games and Total War is that they've always been heavily moddable, and the constant patching and new DLC releases keeps breaking old mods.

At some point, many mod creators stop updating their mods for the most recent version because they retired from the scene.

Just look at the amount of mods in the Steam Workshop for your average Paradox game, or for Rome 2 Total War, where the latest user comments are "Does this work on the most recent version??" and the answer is "No, creator abandoned the mod, it crashes when you try to load it."

I frequently get comments begging me to update my mods. dunno why these retard devs had to turn making a mod into a lifelong obligation.

 

[KateMicucci]

Profanity. I don't want to hear characters shouting FUCKING SHIT TITS CUNT in my games.

 

[luj1]

Dunno how "non-obvious" any of this is, for me all of it is obvious, but here goes,

- unoriginal art direction
- mediocre 2D art (portraits, items)
- dialogue written in contemporary style
- shallow characterisation
- meh OST



TLDR everything is unoriginal and mediocre

 

[luj1]

My take on lore-dumps is only do it if you are SURE you have great writers.

Bullshit of the day

Great writers would never write lore dumps, by definition. Nor should they be made to do it.

There is no "good" way to do lore dumps. It is poor writing, period.

 

[Zerth]

-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.

It's acceptable when you can toggle it off/on. Otherwise I suppose they do it to disguise the fact they were unable or lazy to put assets that can be clearly distinguishable from others. retarded art direction