Game Clichés you hate the most

[Lunar Templar]

"You are the chosen one"

I like just being the guy who kicks a lot of ass because I'm cooler than Fonzie x2. I don't want destiny riding me all day making sure I win.

this one irks me the most. saving the world is fine, but I'd rather it be a side bonus then 'the goal', much as i dislike what FF7 has become, i did always kinda like the bit where Cloud said, in rough terms "I'm going to the crater to kick Sepharoth's ass across the floor, saving the world is just side effect that"

other include
Damsels in distress; I'm just kinda tired of saving princesses, I'd like to get there and have her walking up to great the party for once

bad guys you can tell are evil by just looking at them; pretty self explanatory, more annoying if they start off as your firend

the wise sage; what ever happened to figuring it out as you go?

 

[Zanderinfal]

Snippity snip snip

That is true, but I honestly hate it when characters can't/wont fight without good reason. I can understand if it's to do with their personality, but just to make them unable to fight for no reason irks me. I hate the whole "supermodel kicking ass all day" extreme is just as bad, but I was focusing more on the one I have noticed more recently due to Ico (but that was because that was however done well, unlike other games).

If a character either has no sort practical sense of fighting (yet manages to take down armies) or refuses to fight with nothing larger then a Queen Bee then I really dislike that unless it is explained and makes some sort of sense.

Anyways, thanks for the civilized response.

 

[sethisjimmy]

On rails/turret shooting sections. No I don't particularly want to play a point and click adventure in the middle of this action game. Does anyone like these? Anyone at all? I feel like they're the just gameplay filler for lazy developers.

First person games that choose not to use conventional cutscenes and keep the entire game in first person, but instead take control of the character every five seconds and force you to look where it wants you to. I'm looking at you Far Cry 3 and Crysis 2. Goddamn.

Steam, or fire, or spikes, that block your path in a pattern on and off, and you have to climb a ladder/sidle across something/walk through while it goes on and off and you have to wait for it to stop before moving on to the next one. Yeah, this one is mind bogglingly commom in a wide variety of video games, and seemingly exclusive to the medium. Not fun, not original, entirely pointless.

Cover shooting. Yeah. Pretty sure the only game I've play to have cover shooting in it that was decently well done was Vanquish, mainly in that you can slide around on jets from cover to cover and the game is designed around movement rather than staying behind the same piece of cover. That and there's a dedicated button for taking a smoke break.

Expository text dumps in game. I don't think I ever looked at an ebook for more time than it took to immediately cancel out of it in Deus Ex HR. Reading a lot of emails was monotonous as well. Seems like a really lame way to expand on the game world.

 

[sethisjimmy]

double post, my bad

 

[Zeldias]

The relentless barrage of white people. I just get tired of always knowing I'm gonna be a white guy surrounded by white folks in a eurocentric setting. And if I'm not surrounded by white folks in a eurocentric setting, I'm still probably gonna be a white guy. This is actually what made me buy AC3: Liberation; "Thank the Spaghetti Monster, I can finally be something other than a white person." Even in games where I can create my own character, most of the features and hairstyles lend themselves to whiteness.

I really can't see the arguments for it in most games, either. It's either fantasy/sci-fi, in which case there could be any arrangement of species, but it's still majority white, or some kind of historical past, in which the same can be said. I mean, if we're gonna have werewolves fight vampire necromancer Nazis, how can it be too much of a stretch to have some non-white folks in the cast?

I want to see games that normatize things other than whiteness that don't rely on some kind of racist stereotyping, which is why I so badly want to see a new mainstream Elder Scrolls game set in Hammerfell.

I also hate when games try to force drama by threatening a character that I was meant to like. Persona 4 is an example of this: screw Nanako, I don't give a shit about her and her annoyingly chirpy voice.

And I hate places in RPGs where you're forced to use a character in your party. It worked in Shadow Madness because ultimately, you used everyone, but some games just make it a pain.

 

[KingKickass]

One of the most irritating ones I've experienced is when your character knows instantly how to use a weapon, particularly guns. Now, today's shooters are mainly military so those characters will obviously know how to use their weapons; but different RPG's such as Fallout 3 don't make sense. Now, Fallout 3 is my favorite RPG and is easily one of the best, and is a great example of this cliché. The intro is about your character's child/adolescent stage of life, and at the 10 year mark, your dad gives you a BB gun and has some targets set up for you to practice on; now your character (I'm going to refer to them as he since it makes it easier) may have gone down there over the course of the next 9 years of the Vault 101 stage and practiced with said BB gun, but that doesn't mean he'll know EXACTLY how other weapons, particularly the energy weapons, work as soon as he picks them up. I don't think living in an enclosed environment for the first main part of your life will have you experience such things as PLASMA RIFLES! I think New Vegas did this better because your character is a 30-something year old courier. By that amount of time out in the wasteland you'd have actual experience with a lot of the different weaponry you come across, especially as a courier having to defend yourself.

I think, personally, that in an RPG such as Fallout, the amount of time you use with a certain weapon should increase your skill with it, like at the beginning of the game put some additional points in weapons/items you want your character to be skilled with, then as you pick up say, a plasma rifle, it'll be a lot less accurate, more kick, longer time to reload; all that because your character doesn't know how to work that particular item, and the more you use it the better you get with it. Skyrim did this, but to a lesser extent, only having the experience gained add more power and abilities you can do with that skillset; but Far Cry 3 did this amazingly by having Jason not too familiar with guns as a soldier would be, but then as the game progressed, got more skilled with them.

I don't know, this cliché isn't overdone too much, but when its there it takes me out of the experience and has me question how the protagonist knows how the item works.

Captcha: take wrong turns. Well that's not good life advice, captcha

 

[Magicman10893]

snip

360, probably, but I wouldn't mind checking it out on Steam.

It's still around $40 pre-owned on consoles, but the PC downloads (Gamestop website and Steam) are around $15, so that'll be your best bet if you have a PC that can handle it.

 

[Magicman10893]

One of the most irritating ones I've experienced is when your character knows instantly how to use a weapon, particularly guns. Now, today's shooters are mainly military so those characters will obviously know how to use their weapons; but different RPG's such as Fallout 3 don't make sense. Now, Fallout 3 is my favorite RPG and is easily one of the best, and is a great example of this cliché. The intro is about your character's child/adolescent stage of life, and at the 10 year mark, your dad gives you a BB gun and has some targets set up for you to practice on; now your character (I'm going to refer to them as he since it makes it easier) may have gone down there over the course of the next 9 years of the Vault 101 stage and practiced with said BB gun, but that doesn't mean he'll know EXACTLY how other weapons, particularly the energy weapons, work as soon as he picks them up. I don't think living in an enclosed environment for the first main part of your life will have you experience such things as PLASMA RIFLES! I think New Vegas did this better because your character is a 30-something year old courier. By that amount of time out in the wasteland you'd have actual experience with a lot of the different weaponry you come across, especially as a courier having to defend yourself.

I think, personally, that in an RPG such as Fallout, the amount of time you use with a certain weapon should increase your skill with it, like at the beginning of the game put some additional points in weapons/items you want your character to be skilled with, then as you pick up say, a plasma rifle, it'll be a lot less accurate, more kick, longer time to reload; all that because your character doesn't know how to work that particular item, and the more you use it the better you get with it. Skyrim did this, but to a lesser extent, only having the experience gained add more power and abilities you can do with that skillset; but Far Cry 3 did this amazingly by having Jason not too familiar with guns as a soldier would be, but then as the game progressed, got more skilled with them.

I don't know, this cliché isn't overdone too much, but when its there it takes me out of the experience and has me question how the protagonist knows how the item works.

Captcha: take wrong turns. Well that's not good life advice, captcha

Reminds me of Halo 4. How in the hell does Master Chief know how to instantly fire and reload the Promethean weapons when they can't even figure out how to change the batteries in the damn Plasma weapons yet?

 

[philosophicalbastard]

Reminds me of Halo 4. How in the hell does Master Chief know how to instantly fire and reload the Promethean weapons when they can't even figure out how to change the batteries in the damn Plasma weapons yet?

Humans can innately handle Forerunner tech, since the Forerunner's designated them reclaimers and fucked around with their DNA to let them use all their stuff.

OT:
I've become quite sick of turret sections that bolt you to a seat, point you at the enemy, and make you shoot at them for a very dull couple of minutes.

 

[major_chaos]

I'm going to say having extremely limited ability use in RPGs is something that bugs me, most common example is having a mana pool that regenerates very slowly or not at all. I have been happy to see a number of recent games (Diablo 3, GuildWars 2, and The Secret World off the top of my head) introduce alternative resource systems that actually allow you to use your abilities often without having to chug mana restoring potions.

 

[Cavan]

When they try to do tutorials and in game hints by making the character try to say them vaguely in universe.

"maybe I should try looking under those boxes"
"I can climb up here"
"there's a *item* over there, I should go pick it up"

etc

 

[Calibanbutcher]

The women who can't defend themselves. It has been done well before, but when it's "I'm a women and I can't fight or I can't shoot a gun because of reasons of I dunno lol."

The reverse is just as bad. When some supermodel-looking female character is able to take down massive men built like brick shithouses because either it's plot-convenient or because the designers (or their target demographic) have a hard-on for "strong women", it's equally irritating and equally cliche.

Not that I have a problem with strong women. But if Princess Poutylips McPerkybutt is going to take down Zangeif, the Collossus of the East in hand-to-hand combat, I'd like to see it done plausibly. I totally believe that a smaller fighter can defeat a larger fighter, as when I practiced Aikido I used to routinely get tossed around like a ragdoll by people half my weight and used to render massve guys double my height helpless with a simple joint-lock, but I'd like the game to respect me enough to actually show it. Don't just expect me to be distracted by your dressing the princess in the royal thong of empowerment in the hopes that I'd not notice that your size four heroine just delivered a bunch of completely ineffective jabs and swats and for her 300 lb brawler opponent to go down now could only happen by tossing physics out the window.

I second that one, Waif-Fu is just annoying. I am all for women kicking ass, but in a "realistic" game, I would prefer them to do so by means which could theoretically work. If that means that all heroines from now on have to train Muay-Thai and Aikido or BJJ, then so be it.

And no, a kick to the balls will not incapacitate the "I eat steroids for breakfast"-titan who just threw a car at her and single-handedly kicked so much ass that his foot permanently smells of sh*t.


And on a more off-topicey note:
Aikido is about using your opponents force against him, if I am not mistaken.
So what would happen if someone approached you very carefully, slowly and without being tense at all, slowly raised his hands, brought them in closer, still withouth great speed, and then gave you a one-inch-punch?

 

[Richardplex]

snip

360, probably, but I wouldn't mind checking it out on Steam.

If you're getting it on PC, get it on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Desert-to-Sea-Bundle-Download/dp/B0091T6FQO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1356821947&sr=8-1&keywords=desert+bundle
All of them give you codes for steam. Or if you have absolutely no interest in the bioshock games, go here (again, steam codes):
http://www.greenmangaming.com/
Where it should be around $8 for a short time. But you've gotta really not want the Bioshocks to avoid getting them for $1 a piece.

Pc version has some mouse acceleration apparently, but I never noticed it. It's truly a stellar game, with huge replay value in looking for all the symbolism and whatnot in it.

Amazon.com and Greenmangaming both seem to be serious about being viable alternatives to steam (even though they sell steam keys). This pleases me (because this sort of competition is consumer friendly).

OT: cut scenes and gameplay mechanics not matching up at all. Mass Effect characters, you have these things called shields, why don't they work in cutscenes? They work just fine in the novels!

For actual clichés, um, you are the hero, me being a whirlwind of death, People giving some random stranger a quest, ...you know what? Everything that RPGs share, that'd be easier.

 

[Calibanbutcher]

And on a more off-topicey note:
Aikido is about using your opponents force against him, if I am not mistaken.
So what would happen if someone approached you very carefully, slowly and without being tense at all, slowly raised his hands, brought them in closer, still withouth great speed, and then gave you a one-inch-punch?

Well, I've been out of the art for a long time and don't want to pretend to be an expert in it. But I have been in certain groups that train with folks who do one-inch-punches. Punches from people who know how to punch well are harder to deal with, but in the end all punches must deliver kinetic energy from the attacker to the attack-ee, so there's something there that an aikidoka can deal with. And if the punch is so slow as to give no kinetic energy away, it's probably easily avoided.

But then speaking of avoiding things, I suspect if I asked my friend who teaches aikido about such a hypothetical match-up, he'd suggest not getting into fights with people who have specifically trained to fight aikidoka.

Not a slow punch per se, but rather a slow positioning of the limbs, followed by an incredibly strong burst of kinetic energy over a very short distance, thus making it very hard to react in a timely manner.

Also, how does one train to specifically fight aikidoka? Wouldn't the ol "just be better than them" be sufficient?

 

[Pescetarian]

RPGs as far as the eye can see. Looking at the Steam Holiday sale screen now, only one of the ten advertised games (Limbo) isn't an RPG. I know there are good pure FPS's, good platformers, good puzzle games and so on, but they're few and far bewteen of late.

 

[Marik Bentusi]

Anti-heroes for the sake of being gritty = realistic. Dark has been mistaken for profound ever since the first tenth-grader wrote his first shitty poem, and it seems we never grow out of that phase in some parts. Tho instead of some highschooler, that place is usually taken by a twenty-something Slab McBulkmeat that looks young but behaves like a grizzled veteran to appear like a badass.
It just looks like a kid pretends to look adult by nicking a par of sunglasses, trenchcoat and a trilby (to which he refers to as a fedora).

You can put us in a realistic setting and contrast it with an honest-to-good positive and constructive person, y'know (without that person being an Idiot Hero).

Oh yeah and dwarves. Dwarves are always the same old boring little bearded alcoholic Scotsmen smiths with some basic celtic theme to it.
Tho I guess in general """Fantasy""" seems to be in an awful lot of stagnation, what's really boring me to tears is that it's so commonly accepted an entire race is culturally homogeneous. It's just sooo boooring.

 

[Marik Bentusi]

When mechanics don't make sense with design. For example, in Dota, "Tiny"-a freaking ROCK giant got zero armor.

Well he doesn't wear anything over his "skin", right?