Your minor video game pet peeves?

[Ronald Nand]

Give us the ability to try out a class in an RPG before we choose our class

I've played many RPG's where there are interesting looking classes that use abilities like hacking or telekinesis (Mass Effect Adept and Infiltrator, Borderlands 2 Siren, Shadowrun Decker etc.), so I try playing these classes and I find myself bad at combat early game and I'm not having much fun at all, so I end up just switching to the more conventional combat focused classes. I don't want to sink over 10 hours into an RPG only to find out I hate the class I'm playing, so I'll just pick something I know I'll like playing as.

I know that these classes take a little while to get into the groove of combat, so why can't I play a combat simulation of these classes with a couple of their basic skills developed so I can see how these classes play when you've sunk a couple of hours into them.

Skip Intro Cutscenes and Missions in RPG

When I played Mass Effect 2, I had to play that intro 3 times to work out which class I liked playing as, the same deal with Mass Effect 3 but I only had to do that once, in Borderlands 2 it was worse I had played through with all the characters leveling them up to the point where I could do the special before deciding which class to pick. All this has convinced me that we should be able to skip cutscenes and missions in the opening during these playthrough's where we are just experimenting to see which class works.

No Quicksave

I hate repeating stuff that I have already done and mastered, so I want to quicksave before tough moments so I don't have to repeat trivial combat encounters. I know it leads to save scumming but it's a single player game, who cares if I'm exploiting the game. That being said if a game's gameplay can justify it not having quicksave (hotline miami) its fine.

 

[laggyteabag]

Checkpoints waaay before a boss fight
If you die in a boss fight and then it pushes you waaaaaaaaaaay back so you have to travel a large distance/kill all of the mobs before the fight begins/go through dialogue again. Is it so hard to have a checkpoint just before the fight starts? It has made me stop playing a game more than once.

Clothes/features that don't sit correctly on a character
I understand that different armours or features such as hair don't all have the same proportions, but when one piece of armour clips through another, or if a weapon is floating on your back or in your hands, than thats a immersion deal-breaker right there.

Poor lip-syncing
Nothing is worse in a dialogue-driven game than poor lip-syncing. If your characters dont actually look like they are saying what they are actually saying, then you have done something horribly wrong. I'm okay with it in older games though, it only seems to bother me in newer ones for some reason.

Multiple class games that dont start immediately with combat
How hard can it seriously be to implement some kind of test arena or something so that you can see how your character plays before you make the commitment? The Mass Effect series is the fucking worst.

 

[babinro]

Not sure if I'd call these minor...but. LACK OF OPTIONS!

Why can't I modify the following in all my single player games:
- rate of xp gain
- rate of gold (primary) reasource gain
- monster difficulty slider
- strength of my characters
- running speed
etc

Ever check out the game options in titles like Civ 5 or an EA Sports game?

- Why can't I get those same kinds of options when playing Dragon Age: Inquisition single player campaign?
- Why can't I just start with all items in Arkham Origins?
- Why can't I adjust gun damage in CoD campaign mode?
- Why can't start Bioshock Infinite will all Vigors?

Have your recommended settings like you do now. But give the players the options to adjust the game to their liking. Maybe I want to play your RPG but I don't want to grind the same zone of monsters for 2 hours. Maybe I enjoy using a handgun but it's simply outclassed by other weapon types to the point of becoming useless.

Let players have the most fun with your game possible.

 

[mrdude2010]

A) Mirror matches
B) Multiplayer where luck is an important part of the result (CoD, Halo Reach, basically any FPS that isn't an arena shooter). The exception to this is Assassin's Creed, which is still fun in small doses.
C) Stealth sections where detection and the alarm being sounded are simultaneous: if I'm actively in midair and you happen to spot me falling on you less than a second before your death, you're not going to have time to scream or cry out to alert anyone.

 

[Combustion Kevin]

Super light and dashing rogues being more capable at armed combat than the people who have better arms and armour and have obviously been training for a longer time.
Just for once, I would like to play an assassin's game where fighting armed guards actually feels dangerous, where you have roughly the same amount of health as the people you're going after and your only advantage is your stealth and unusual equipment.

Looking at Assassin's Creed in particular, but plenty of (J)RPG's are guilty of this as well, trained soldiers should not be the lowest grade opponents in your game unless you're Monster Hunter!

 

[DementedSheep]

In RPGs where the bosses are always immune to stat changes and status effects like poisoning or reducing attack, etc.

The boss battles should be where you really need to rely on strategy, but they're immune to attacks that lend themselves to a strategic playstyle (ie those that would weaken them). Random encounters tend to be weak enough that all you need is a few turns of regular damage-dealing moves, meaning that there's no time ever to use debuff powers or spells and those abilities become effectively pointless.

Argh I hate this, I hate it so much that it's not a minor pet peeve. I like using CC and de-buffs but because in lot of games bosses are completely immune to them it's pointless. Minor enemies you're better off just going for damage to kill them quick and you don't build around fighting minor enemies anyway.
Obviously it needs to be balanced so you can't stun-lock a boss or debuff them so much they hit like a wet paper towel. I've seen games where you just can't stunlock because cooldowns, enemies develop resistance to CC with repeated use which wears of over time or are immune for certain amount of time after being CCed and where powerful debuffs get scaled down if they de-fang bosses too much. Making them outright immune is just lazy.

Old forgotten realms games also sometimes had a issue with rouges being crit based but undead are immune to crits and the big bad tends to have an army of undead. You still need to take them for locking picking, spotting and traps but their near useless in many of the fights.

 

[Flammablezeus]

Isn't calling something a minor pet peeve a redundancy? If it's not minor, then it's not really a pet peeve.

Clipping is one that gets to me. I remember first noticing it when playing Goldeneye on N64 and it annoys me as much now as it did then. This is especially bad when gear and weapons held by characters clips with the actual model. I mean, these things were designed specifically to go together, so why do they still so often clip together?

Lack of variety in walking and running speeds is another. Especially when none of the speeds match up with NPCs. RDR tackled this in a nice way by letting you match the speed of NPCs that you're meant to be travelling with, which makes it even worse that games still continue to mess this up.

 

[JohnnyDelRay]

Checkpoints waaay before a boss fight
Clothes/features that don't sit correctly on a character

Gotta agree on these two. Just like the individual citing the Witcher 2 above as an example to follow. Is it really that hard to implement a proper way for weapons to sit on your body? It's 2014 dammit. Maybe you can excuse some really lower budget games, but Dragon Age: Origins was just ridiculous, dual daggers floating in the air and magical magnetic bows. Not a deal breaker, but still an annoyance.

Checkpoints or save areas way before boss fights is a deal breaker though. I gave up both early Dead Rising games, whose bosses aren't even that difficult mind you, just because I couldn't be bothered trudging all the way back to start the confrontation again and again because I was running somewhere and got clipped on something and killed as a result.

Any mine personally:
-Fighting games which need razor precise timing to execute combos: namely new Street Fighter series, it's just insane how hard it is but maybe it's just me. Every previous game in the series before SF4 I could practically do it blindfolded. Now, I can't even string 2 hits together reliably. I've resorted back to playing Mortal Kombat games!

-Boss fights which don't rely on skill, but rather a very, very specific sequence of actions that take forever to figure out or are extremely hard to reveal due to cheapness. That's why I really don't mind Dark Souls or Ninja Gaiden bosses, because as tough as they are, you can only really blame yourself for any screw ups. I've just started playing Evil Within, apparently this will grind my gears because of that type of tedious guessing and trial-and-error.

-Save points/scene triggering points that give no indication, and you are forced to continue while you have left some area unexplored unintentionally. There is simply no way back, you've entered the next chapter, that's it, and unless you want to play the whole previous chapter again there's no way check that one alleyway or door which could very well be nothing at all. This really annoys me. But then if you have prompts coming up everytime you're about to leave a chapter, that'd break immersion I s'pose, annoying a whole other crowd. For me, it's ok if a "press E to exit the level" comes up, indicating that's your final move, though.

 

[Something Amyss]

Multiple class games that dont start immediately with combat
How hard can it seriously be to implement some kind of test arena or something so that you can see how your character plays before you make the commitment? The Mass Effect series is the fucking worst.

Same with appearances. Let us see how our characters look in the real game, especially if we can't change it later. Another Bioware issue.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

Looking at Assassin's Creed in particular, but plenty of (J)RPG's are guilty of this as well, trained soldiers should not be the lowest grade opponents in your game unless you're Monster Hunter!

Gods this.

When I play assassins creed its always with a sort of bored apathetic attitude. I dont have to (nor do i often get the opportunity to) plan an assassination cleverly and with great forethought to my escape. An assassin is a single man, and the whole draw is that a single man, when in the perfect place at the perfect time, can topple empires without anyone knowing he even existed.

In assassins creed youre such a walking god compared to the guards and soldiers that the game is laughably trivial. I can kill 200 armed men with a sword and the counter button, march up to my target and bash his head in with a chair before repeating the process to leave. I get the same story result as if I was like a ghost. When I can conceivably kill EVERY soldier in the kings army with ease the conflict stops making sense. Why do we care about the red coats, I could kill every red coat in the whole of the UK and the colonies and it would only cost me some time? Why is there such a focus on any assassination when I could just butcher the enemy wholesale, what good is the use of an assassin when im basically a walking WMD?

That stuff just really annoys me, and its present in lots of RPG's as well where the bulk of the antagonists over arching army are just chaff, making their whole faction a joke. "Evil empire invades and is a big threat! Your party can and will kill several hundred of their soldiers as base mobs with no effort expended at all but the war is still really important and stuff for some reason and the army is totally scary!".

 

[Something Amyss]

I love Bioware games to death, but there have been far too many occasions where I've finished making a Shepard/Hawke, go 'Yeah, this looks good' and then the next scene where the camera angle/lighting is different I just go 'oh no' and reset.

Dawn of War was better at this, Bioware, and that's a top-down RTS where you command thousands of same-looking dudes!

I like the style of the Saints Row games, where you can essentially rebuild your character entirely. Granted, this still doesn't help with the "class" bit, but if you get int the game and your character looks like Sloth from Goonies, you can fix it. Assuming you weren't trying to make Sloth, because Sloth as President sounds awesome.

 

[renegade7]

In RPGs where the bosses are always immune to stat changes and status effects like poisoning or reducing attack, etc.

The boss battles should be where you really need to rely on strategy, but they're immune to attacks that lend themselves to a strategic playstyle (ie those that would weaken them). Random encounters tend to be weak enough that all you need is a few turns of regular damage-dealing moves, meaning that there's no time ever to use debuff powers or spells and those abilities become effectively pointless.

Argh I hate this, I hate it so much that it's not a minor pet peeve. I like using CC and de-buffs but because in lot of games bosses are completely immune to them it's pointless. Minor enemies you're better off just going for damage to kill them quick and you don't build around fighting minor enemies anyway.
Obviously it needs to be balanced so you can't stun-lock a boss or debuff them so much they hit like a wet paper towel. I've seen games where you just can't stunlock because cooldowns, enemies develop resistance to CC with repeated use which wears of over time or are immune for certain amount of time after being CCed and where powerful debuffs get scaled down if they de-fang bosses too much. Making them outright immune is just lazy.

Old forgotten realms games also sometimes had a issue with rouges being crit based but undead are immune to crits and the big bad tends to have an army of undead. You still need to take them for locking picking, spotting and traps but their near useless in many of the fights.

One good solution I've seen was from Golden Sun, where your ability to recover from status changes was based on your character stats. So characters with very high stats (like bosses) could be debuffed or have a status affliction, but it would recover quickly so you had to keep the pressure on to keep them weakened. And on top of that different effects would recover at different rates, ie blindness or a debuff might last a few turns but more powerful curses like blocking their magic or making them sleep might only last one or two.

So I think that's the way to implement, make it so that you have to tactically manage exactly how you're keeping the boss weakened.

The other way, and I really wish some RPG maker would try this, is to just make the non-boss encounters more worthwhile. Fewer but more difficult encounters, instead of the endless stream of mooks being sent to their inevitable death and doing nothing but taking up your time.

 

[FPLOON]

At first I was going to ask my past self, in which he'll say:

1. Multiplayer Trophies - Let me break this one down with three reasons why this in one of my pet peeves... #3) These types of trophies are the least likely to last as long as you want them to, compared to single player trophies... (In other words, "get then while they're hot"!) #2) If you don't have the "skillz" to pull them off, I'm sure persuading one of your friend to help you get them by any means necessary... and #1) They are required to get in order to get that 100% achievements... (Fuck you game for thinking I was going to roll with that, especially when the multiplayer is either shoe-horned in and/or the trophies themselves could have been in their own damn section!)

2. Lack of Enjoyment - Subjective as it is, if I'm not having fun... It's not always me who has "the problem"...

3. Inexcusable Criticism - I get how you don't like a particular genre or a particular style of gameplay... That does not mean it objectively "sucks"... (Also, you better have a good reason for your opinion of a game you haven't even played, yet you're already have your "suck pistols" at the ready...)

Those last two seem to switch, given both the circumstances and/or my subjective mood that day... However, #1 will always be #1 until I grow old and complain about the next next generation's technology or something like that... (I WILL have a cane, dammit! ...And I will NOT be afraid to smack some sense into that particular generation, by gummit...)

But then, not that long ago this month, actually, I remember the one minor thing that peeves the pets off of me to no ends... Luckily, this Penny Arcade is here to sum it up for me:
http://i1216.photobucket.com/albums/dd363/AraHamako/215545125_2WyZt-L-2.jpg

Spoiler: Mmmmmm... Ranting... (Warning: Contains too many unnecessary uses of the word Fuck...)

But seriously, FUCK YOU, JIMINY'S JOURNAL!! It's bad enough your fucking journal in Kingdom Hearts 2 made me never play that fucking game on anything less than fucking Proud ever again just to see that super special awesome fudge-coated fucking secret ending without having to fucking deal with your fucking requisite bullfuckingshit, but NOW I have no fucking choice but to either finish your fucking Journal (only this fucking time it's the FUCKING "Final Mix" edition with more bells and whistles than the many fucking objectives (fucking required and not) in the DS version of fucking 358/2 Days) or get my fucking ass kicked by both the fucking Lingering Will as well as the fucking data replicas of every Organization XIII member ON TOP on giving those fucking Mushroom XIII fuckers every type of metaphorical non-sex-related sex-job just so that they can cough up one of the three fucking proofs that I'm fucking worthy of unlocking the muthafukkin' "super special awesome fudge-coated fucking secret ending"-esque secret fucking ending for Birth By Sleep this fucking time because I'm fucking playing the fucking game on FUCKING CRITICAL! WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?! What the fuck happened between fucking FM games 1 and 2 that made you fucking go "Holy fucking shit! There was so much fucking shit I wanted recorded in the first fucking journal that I want you [Sora] to fucking top that shit almost thrice-fold, muthafukka! DID I FUCKING STUDDA, *****?!" metaphorically speaking? For fucks sake, I hope your fucking journal in Kingdom Hearts 3 doesn't makes me hate it more than how it is in fucking Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix, especially if that shit leads to a fucking unlocking of a[nother] fucking "super special awesome fudge-coated fucking secret ending"-esque true/secret fucking ending in the fucking process... Shit...

(I'm really sorry for those of you that only clicked on this spoiler tag out of sheer curiosity...)

Anyway, it's the only thing that peeves me about Kingdom Hearts 2 [Final Mix] in general, so it's SUPER minor in comparison to how much fun I do have in said game in general... Other than that, RNG collectible-finding (or just most RNG-based mechanics) in any game in general peeves me in a more annoying way than in a frustrating kind of way since they're more based on luck than skill when you [really] get down to it...

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I hate "missable" content, like certain side-quests or items, that lock you out of 100% completion without so much as a friendly warning. Applies to one-shot locations and arbitrary "points of no return" in more linear games as well.

 

[Johnny Impact]

Getting pushed into a corner by an enemy. Certain foes in Dark Souls do this a lot. Okay, I get that I should have dived left rather than right just then. But is it really necessary for the Iron Boar to pin me and smash away my whole health bar a chunk at a time while I watch helplessly? (I can almost hear Dark Souls answering, "Yes, it is necessary. And it will be necessary the next time it happens. And the time after that. Now shut up and take your medicine, Impact.")

 

[Shoggoth2588]

A lack of control options can really annoy me and I'm finding this kind of thing in a number of Nintendo games. The Wii U has the best D-Pad in generations but why can't I use THAT to control my characters in Smash and allocate the taunt-buttons to the left stick? or the Triggers? Or anywhere else? Furthermore, why couldn't I use the classic controller with Skyward Sword? Yeah, I know it would have meant a few extra weeks or months of development time but it would have been a lot easier on people like me who are hated by the Gods of motion controls. Then there are finer options that I'd like to change in some of these Nintendo games like brightness settings, sound levels, and again button layouts.

Other things that I really dislike are things like;

(Online exclusive) Multiplayer Trophies/Achievements
DLC-exclusives Trophies/Achievements appearing despite my lack of said DLC
The fact that Saint's Row 2 is the only game that has ever let me create a gender-less player character
Pre-Boss auto saves that don't save before lengthy pre-boss-fight-cutscenes
There hasn't been a proper Sonic Sequel since Adventure 2 (or Rush Adventure)
What the Fuck happened to Sparkster the Rocket Knight?!
Why is the Wii U's virtual console growing at such a horribly slow rate and,
Why hasn't the Wii's virtual console just been fully merged with the Wii U's?!
Why hasn't Sega put anything on the Wii U's virtual console?
Did Sonic 4 really need to be episodic? Also, where's the third episode?
Why do people sing the praises of Xenoblade Chronicles when people ignored Monolithsoft's best RPG, Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans
When the Fuck are Monolithsoft going to make DBZ:AotS's sequel!?!?!

 

[MetalDooley]

Cutscenes

It's nearly 2015 skippable,pauseable,rewindable cutscenes still aren't an industry standard.Come on devs sort this shit out

Screen obscuring

By this I specifically mean when the screen turns red or blurry or is spalttered with blood to signify damage.I don't know if CoD was the first to do this but the success of MW2 meant everybody bloody copied it.It either needs to go away completely or make it optional and let me have a health bar/counter

 

[sageoftruth]

A) Mirror matches
B) Multiplayer where luck is an important part of the result (CoD, Halo Reach, basically any FPS that isn't an arena shooter). The exception to this is Assassin's Creed, which is still fun in small doses.
C) Stealth sections where detection and the alarm being sounded are simultaneous: if I'm actively in midair and you happen to spot me falling on you less than a second before your death, you're not going to have time to scream or cry out to alert anyone.

On a similar note to C) Stealth sections where detection and taking damage are simultaneous.

Splinter Cell was a prime offender there. One moment a guard is on patrol, thinking nothing is wrong and then the next moment, he's emptying the contents of his assault rifle into my character with pinpoint precision. The only thing you can do when that happens is neutralize him as quickly as possible. At least in other stealth games, running away was an option.