Little Nitpicks in Game Design that Drive You Nuts

[StriderShinryu]

One of my current annoyances is synchronising viewpoints in Assassin's Creed 3, the church steeples in particular. When the view circles around Connor, you can clearly see that his foot is hovering just above the steeple. If they made flying a secret animus super power then that would be awesome, but they didn't so it continues to irritate me every time.

That's actually another very good one, though not for me in regards to AC3. We all know that it's tough getting a character to properly interact with the game world in a detailed sense, especially when you're talking about a character picking up or putting down an object. It's tough to make it look good, we get it. So why do developers still insist on using moments like these in cutscenes or other dramatic moments where there's absolutely no way to not see just how jarring it looks?

 

[triggrhappy94]

Oh there is nothing more noticable than clipping issues and really bad lip syncing.

OT: PLAYER AGENCY! (/jk) It is annoying though. I really enjoyed trying to figure out which parts of the map I could and couldn't get to in games like Halo. Also, if I want to waste all my grenade messing around with the physics objects, then I should be able to.

 

[Baron von Blitztank]

Switches which open doors on opposite sides of a room.
I can kind of brush it off in places that are meant to serve as "Trials to stop the unworthy from acquiring the death object" because those are meant to be rooms that test and murder you. But if you set it in a real place like Venice or a Cruise ship then shit just gets ridiculous!
Why do I have to go into a building behind a locked door just to open a trapdoor in the opposite building on the other side of the canal?

 

[Jfswift]

Maybe it's my imagination but some games like Skyrim and World of Warcraft seemed to have areas or ruins you couldn't enter. I get really OCD about exploring in RPGs. It drives me crazy if I find what looks like an entrance to something and i can't go in.

 

[Jfswift]

Maybe it's my imagination but some games like Skyrim and World of Warcraft seemed to have areas or ruins you couldn't enter. I get really OCD about exploring in RPGs. It drives me crazy if I find what looks like an entrance to something and i can't go in.

fallout 3.. a destroyed city full of potential and 99% of the buildings were static blocks you couldnt enter without a mod. that annoyed me. wasted potential

I remember thinking that too when I first played it. So many buildings weren't accessible. I wish you could have read some of the books too or maybe had access to more old computer data or disks to look at. (skyrim did that right I think.) I like a little narrative. I had this issue when playing minez with a friend.

 

[Simonator7]

Invisible walls in open world games like Fallout etc definitely. Nothing is more immersion breaking than trail blazing your own path to an objective to suddenly stop for no apparent reason because "its not what the developer intended". Why not put an actual wall there? Or a sheer rock face or whatever would make sense, just anything other than pure solid nothingness. This extends to the aforementioned wasted buildings in those games. You can find all manner of guns/explosives/melee weapons/etc, slay mutated creatures and people encapsulated in power armor but boards across a door are too much?

Having my freedom of control taken away from me in non-cutscene sections is my biggest pet peeve however. A specific example would be in the original Assassins Creed when you would engage in narrative dialogue with a person, you still be able to control Altair, but invisible walls (they really do suck) would appear in the room leaving you standing around dumbly while the conversation is happening. Another more recent example is RE6 where the game would decide you really, really needed to see that door that's in the other direction forcing the camera over to it while your still allowed to move. Why not just make these things cut scenes? That sort of thing really bites my banger.

Other people have mentioned not being able to see legs and bodies in an fps game, I have the reverse opinion to be honest. I don't want to look down and see my legs because no game has ever done it properly. Look at any game this features and honestly ask yourself whether it looks natural and not completely silly.

 

[Rack]

This is more of a nitpick, but in Skyrim there are about 200,000 lines of text in books you can read in game and about 7 on the loading screens. It surely can't be that hard to put codex entries and discovered books in the loading screens so I'm not just sitting there bored.

 

[Daveman]

Animations of doors or cupboards opening when you're just going to go to an inventory screen or a loading screen anyway. The hours that must have eaten into my life...

 

[Karhukonna]

In Mass Effect 2, if you create a custom Shepard and somehow end up disliking him/her, you have to watch the intro again. The character creator just doesn't let you view the model in enough detail. I always ended up with ridiculous cheeks or something.

And to top it off, you can't just do something else while the intro plays out. There's the scene where you have to manually walk all the way to the cockpit to save Joker. Pisses me off so goddamn much. Hello gamedevs, when you press start, you should immediately see character creation, not a goddamn 15 minute intro.

 

[TheSteeleStrap]

It bothers me when I have a cutscene that I can't pause, and trying to do so ends up skipping it. I want the whole story, but I have to go to the bathroom!

 

[MetalDooley]

Clairvoyant enemies - when you set off an alarm and every enemy in the vicinity instinctively knows exactly where you are

Auto alarms - I'm sneaking up on an enemy and he spots me just as I'm about to kill him and this automatically alerts the rest of the guards.Somehow in the half second between him spotting me and me killing him he managed to alert everyone else in the area.Bonus annoyance points if getting spotted makes you fail the mission

NPC's with perfect accuracy. 1 good example, in the game Sniper: Ghost warrior I am sitting a 100 feet on top of a lighthouse thingy sniping baddies, and they all have pistols and AK's and are hitting me with every shot.

This really annoys me too and actually ties in a lot of the time to my first point of clairvoyant enemies.A good example is FarCry 2.I'd snipe a guy and his buddies would all automatically know exactly where I was even though I was lying in the middle of a bush half a mile away.Even better they'd be able to hit me at that range with bloody shotguns

 

[Lenny Magic]

Making a few objects in a game destroyable, then making the majority not. I don't know why, but this really bugs me a great deal. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series immediately comes to mind for this sort of thing.

 

[Mr.Cynic88]

From a storytelling standpoint, it bothers me that games never acknowledge your avatar is a one-man holocaust machine. Your character tends to be "the only hope," but they fail to mention that it's because you execute ten people on your way to the bathroom. A developer should incorporate your high body count into the story - if nothing else it would add some interesting moral dilemmas to "good/bad" choices and would greatly increase immersion.

 

[dancolls]

Most of my gripes have been pointed out, even this one, but the hell with it.

Characters drinking. Freelancer, pretty much any Bethesda RPG, the Mass Effect games, Dragon Age 2, and many many more, all get this horribly, jarringly wrong. Red Dead Redemption did this quite well, if I recall. All you have to do is position the camera properly. And, if you're feeling brave, perhaps model in the liquid being drained from the glass. Just for the love of Jebus stop showing us people raising empty glasses to a few centimetres away from their face, swallowing, and then going 'Ahhh' as if the sip of sod all they just imbibed was God's own jizz.

Also, thinking about it, that little head shake that all the Bioware and Rockstar protagonists do after drinking. Shepherd is a badass, one sip of space whiskey isn't going to make him shudder like a 14 year old sneaking vodka from his Dad's drink stash.

 

[King Billi]

Little things huh?

When I'm looking at a games map screen, it helps to ahve some indication of what direction my character facing.

If a game has cutscenes then it should have an option to rewatch them from the main menu.

If my character is about to die then just let them die please... this is kind of hard to explain but sometimes games will keep giving you chances to save yourself from the brink of death over and over and over again. Once is okay but after that I'm happy to just die and start again thanks.

 

[sXeth]

Falling through the map/Glitching through walls to end up outside the gameworld.

How the hell has this not been fixed somehow in the 15-20 odd years of 3d games? Duke 3d, Ocarina, Skyrim, Far Cry 3 the other day. They can't thicken the level geometry or build some back-porting trigger around the levels?)

 

[Voxgizer]

As mentioned before, unskippable cutscenes. Those and when characters' feet dip into the floor a little bit.

Why are my guy's shoes phasing through that concrete? TELL ME!