Most annoying non-obvious things in modern gaming

[fuzz]

Making iron sights mandatory to reduce recoil/spread - I've spent time to properly setup my FOV and mouse sensitivity settings, only to make it all meaningless when a time comes to actually start shooting. Game window zooms in, can't see shit; different sensitivity kicks in and you're no longer able to properly strafe, too.

Games pinging home to create data sets for some exec to further monetize/dumb stuff down.

 

[Bigg Boss]

Mediocre remakes that people eat up. Looking at you Capcom.

 

[ghostlife]

-still not having flawless mouse movement or acceptable config files 27 years after quake came out

-forced camera movements that give first-person games a very on-rails/cutscene/console port feel. This is what made e.g. Kingdom Come Deliverance extremely unfun to me

 

[KateMicucci]

Tried to replay Farcry 4 yesterday. Got bored and gave up because of the long UNSKIPPABLE cutscenes.

 

[lefthandblack]

If the number of dlc's that your game has means that I'm going to have to spend the same amount or more to get the full game as what I paid for the base, I'm not going to buy your game.

 

[Norfleet]

(usually with the same-ish lame-ass report, because you're special ops and therefore every gun must be supressed).

I'll let you in on a little secret: That part is actually realistic. Even if the gun isn't suppressed, it sure will sound that way after you fire as many rounds as you typically fire in a vidya game because you will be deaf and can't hear shit.

 

[Alienman]

This one should be obvious, but no one points it out: how long every game takes to fucking release.

Yeah, yeah, "gaymes are bigger now so they take longer to make!!!". Dev teams are also like 10-20x bigger than they were in the 00s, with budgets 10-100x the size, and yet unless you're the kind of manchild who still buys Fifa every year, you're waiting several years for sequels that would've taken 2 in the past. It's impossible to become invested in a series if I realise that I'm probably going to have kids my age by the time the next one comes out, and be dead and buried before it ever ends.

And the main reason they all take so much longer now is pure WASTE. Big bloated companies that are like 30% managers, advisors, and HR she-gremlins bribing jack-off devs who give 0 shits into the office with bean-bags and free Red Bulls. Working in tech myself I can tell you this exact bullshit happens all over the industry, and was the major cause of last year's lay-offs, but it's far worse in gaming because large gaming companies are some of the only places in the world where you can go 6+ years without releasing ANYTHING, because jaw-hanging troglodytes still buy your fucking online passes and re-releases on the daily. If these guys actually had to work for their pay-cheques a little, we'd be seeing dev times half of what they are now among AAA teams.

It's an issue that honestly bothers me a lot more than the general decline in game quality, because at least if you release a shitty game with short cycles, you get another shot at a good game reasonably soon. But when you wait 10 years for GTA 6 or TES 6, the game had better be a fucking masterpiece--and if it's not then the fans can all forget about getting a good one this side of retirement.

This has absolutely devasted gaming from a consumer standpoint when it comes to big publishers. Especially from someone that doesn't care about online cartoon shooters, mobas, or king of the hill style of games. There are almost no new single-player games coming out, thanks to the milking that now lasts for decades. Holy shit, man. The gaming industry is such a drag currently. See, I don't mind the occasional pop-a-mole or whatever, it's like watching a blockbuster spectacle (not Marvel shit, though). But now those kinds of games are a rarity, and if something does come out it's part of the same old franchises but now with guaranteed performance issues. The state of things is dreadful, and if that wasn't enough, instead of getting new stuff, all that dev time is wasted on remakes. Oh joy, 4 years of development for a game you already played, and know everything about.

Luckily we still got a few indies, but the dev cycle for those titles is long as hell too. However, the good stuff is incredibly rare here too. It has me constantly going back to play the (modern) "classics", instead of exploring new things which is starting to get a bit boring.

 

[Hag]

Huge installs size. Feels like a symptom of modern gaming : badly designed games crammed with data, frameworks spilling resources, and a total lack of care for the end-user.

 

[Üstad]

Bad UI.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

Huge installs size. Feels like a symptom of modern gaming : badly designed games crammed with data, frameworks spilling resources, and a total lack of care for the end-user.

FFXII remaster for PC was ridiculous, the game was 4gb on PS2 but on PC suddenly it's 40gb or more. It's the same with every JRPG remaster, probably because they're converting all the cutscenes to 4k, which it's fucking retarded, i would rather watch 480p cutscenes than waste all my disk space on one game, should at least gives us a option to download low quality cutscenes instead when downloading the games.

 

[ds]

There is certainly a lot of unneeded space waste like uncompressed audio or giant textures and cutscenes included in the base download instead of being optional. But at the same time you can get spinning rust with over 10 terabytes per drive these days. Compared to unconverted UHD BluRay rips and even high-quality re-encodes, games are tiny per hour of entertainment.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

Bad UI.

for me it's not necesarily just bad UI. I may have a unpopular opinion but i love the big UI of old games with big buttons/icons and text, no trasparency and with fancy visuals that matches the theme. The opposite and the one i hate it's the soulless mobile looking UI of modern games, with small text and icons, often with a out of place look that does not match the game theme. Here a comparison using Master of Orion 2 vs the 2016 one:

 

[ds]

I may have a unpopular opinion

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

I don't know if people agree with me on the big UI covering a lot of screen space and with big text/buttons, i like it.

The soulless look of modern games UI i think everyone agrees with me.

 

[HansDampf]

Modern UIs all look the same.

 

[Hag]

There is certainly a lot of unneeded space waste like uncompressed audio or giant textures and cutscenes included in the base download instead of being optional. But at the same time you can get spinning rust with over 10 terabytes per drive these days. Compared to unconverted UHD BluRay rips and even high-quality re-encodes, games are tiny per hour of entertainment.

My money is finite. My bandwidth is not particularly fast. I don't want to do maintenance on my old computer to add more disks while it's already full cramped inside.
Somehow it is not really a problem since games that grab my attention all have decent disk requirement, and the only time I installed a big one was GTA5 and it was shit, so lesson's learned.

 

[Zarniwoop]

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

Shitcunt millennial faggot pussyboy detected.

 

[Modron]

He's kind of right though millennial game developers use cursing as a crutch in place of learning how to write better they just overuse and abuse expletives until they lose all meaning. Plus they insert them at all the wrong times.

 

[Ezekiel]

There is certainly a lot of unneeded space waste like uncompressed audio or giant textures and cutscenes included in the base download instead of being optional. But at the same time you can get spinning rust with over 10 terabytes per drive these days. Compared to unconverted UHD BluRay rips and even high-quality re-encodes, games are tiny per hour of entertainment.

But UHD movies are fine in spinning rust. You don't need an especially fast hard drive to play them back. Games are preferred in solid state now, which costs far more.

 

[ds]

HDDs are still ok for games if you have enough RAM for disk cache and an operating system that will make good use of it. Note that I am not saying that games should be wasting so much space only that it hasn't been that much of an issue for me so far. It is possible that I would also be more annoyed with modern game sizes if I played more current games.

 

[Butter]

Numbers being shat all over the screen every time you damage an enemy. If it's real time combat, you can't stop what you're doing to actually read the numbers, and they disappear pretty quickly because the developers probably know it's a huge distraction, so why bother putting it there in the first place? I think it's supposed to be a substitute for proper weapon feedback in shitty FPS like Outer Worlds and Borderlands.

 

[ind33d]

Modern UIs all look the same.

Disco Elysium's UI is incredible

 

[gurugeorge]

I just encountered this in PFWOTR, in the bit with Camellia and Horgus at his mansion in the lategame. There's a whole exposition with lots of dialogue choices, and then a fight. I lost that fight the first time, and of course the game put me back before all the palaver, as opposed to right at the start of the fight.

I've always hated when games do that. I mean, if it's a climactic moment in a quest, at that moment, having gone through various preambles to get to that point, I'm usually quite engrossed in the dialogue choices, I'm quite immersed in the rp. To have to go through ALL THAT AGAIN is just immensely irritating. I've been through all that, I'm fired up and rp-ing that character ready to fight at that point. To have to go through that dialogue again is tedious and pulls me out of immersion. Just put me at the start of the combat again goddammit, my failure was in that bit, not in the mountains of dialogue that led up to that bit.

Every fucking CRPG has moments like that, it's just hugely annoying and I see no good reason for it.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Everything reset and/or respaw when you exit and reenter a level.

 

[PapaPetro]

I just encountered this in PFWOTR, in the bit with Camellia and Horgus at his mansion in the lategame. There's a whole exposition with lots of dialogue choices, and then a fight. I lost that fight the first time, and of course the game put me back before all the palaver, as opposed to right at the start of the fight.

I've always hated when games do that. I mean, if it's a climactic moment in a quest, at that moment, having gone through various preambles to get to that point, I'm usually quite engrossed in the dialogue choices, I'm quite immersed in the rp. To have to go through ALL THAT AGAIN is just immensely irritating. I've been through all that, I'm fired up and rp-ing that character ready to fight at that point. To have to go through that dialogue again is tedious and pulls me out of immersion. Just put me at the start of the combat again goddammit, my failure was in that bit, not in the mountains of dialogue that led up to that bit.

Every fucking CRPG has moments like that, it's just hugely annoying and I see no good reason for it.

I like the pithy "Fuck you! [Attack]" option when it's included.