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[Caronte]

Portraits in CRPGs. I'm used to the perfect Baldur's Gate 1&2 portraits, where the art style is consistent, the space the character takes in the portrait is relatively the same, they all show the head and only a bit of the body, things like that.

Whenever a CRPG doesn't follow these rules and the portraits are noticeable different in style I get pissed off. Some games do this right (Pillars of Eternity) but most fail at it (Wasteland 2, Divinity, everything Beamdog has done with Baldur's Gate) and others are just plainly bad (Torment).

 

[Hilbert]

This is something you don't see much anymore, but around the super nintendo and psx era, I hated menu text that was excessively stylized. Like if the words look like 2x4s nailed together and swing back and forth when you select them. Oh it annoyed me. Something like this:

 

[Shifty]

Lengthy input-blocking menu transitions.

I've been playing Lightning Returns and the map / menu screens take forever to appear and disappear.

 

[Spring-Loaded]

More annoyed than outright pissed, but I dislike bullet wound decals on still living player characters in semi-realistic games. Rockstar had this a lot with their most recent games like Max Payne 3 and GTAV.

I'm playing as a human being who's walking around like nothing's wrong with bloody holes peppered over them. I have health bars to see my non-diegetic status—please find a cooler/less goofy way of showing that damage, like having more minor wounds appear, and/or changing their idle stances to involve gingerly holding an arm or their side, or change their walk/to n animations without altering their speeds.That tells me they're hurt, but it doesn't look so dumb. Such a weird detail to go through the trouble of adding.

Once a killing blow is dealt to the character, then feel free to have exit wounds through their torso, but not before, please

 

[Tye The Czar]

Portraits in CRPGs. I'm used to the perfect Baldur's Gate 1&2 portraits, where the art style is consistent, the space the character takes in the portrait is relatively the same, they all show the head and only a bit of the body, things like that.

Whenever a CRPG doesn't follow these rules and the portraits are noticeable different in style I get pissed off. Some games do this right (Pillars of Eternity) but most fail at it (Wasteland 2, Divinity, everything Beamdog has done with Baldur's Gate) and others are just plainly bad (Torment).

Piggybacking on this, having static character portraits that don't convey different emotions just doesn't do enough to help me connect with characters. If you're going to do all text, you might as well add narration and prose along with the dialogue.

 

[Radnom]

Non-uniform pixels in games, i.e. when a low resolution game is rendered at a high resolution, scaling up assets instead of the overall canvas. It looks terrible and I've gone on about it in at least a few threads (to the amusement and annoyance of others) but it really really frustrates me. I know there are others it annoys too, but we're not the majority who don't care.

^ This stuff. There's a weird combination of big pixels and tiny pixels, and it looks really terrible to me.

 

[Laughing Banana]

Weapons magically hanging on the backside of people in RPGs..

Like, they don't fly like that, it's annoooooyyyiingggggggggg.

 

[Bunga]

Probably to make you vulnerable/easier to kill when picking up ammo.

There's no animation for picking up the ammo though, you just hoover it up by moving forward and smashing triangle!

 

[tobactrac]

Weapons magically hanging on the backside of people in RPGs..

Like, they don't fly like that, it's annoooooyyyiingggggggggg.

Haha, the exact opposite bothers me even more, when a weapon is clipping through a character. Or going between hovering and clipping when moving around.

 

[Sajph]

Having to hold buttons to open doors, pick up stuff, or activate something. It infuriates me.

YES

 

[Shaanyboi]

Awkward mocap. Especially in games where the motion captured actions doesn't fit an exaggerated or cartoony aesthetic.

 

[Mephala]

Anything that obscures or distorts your vision. This include vision modes such as

• Templar or Detective Vision.
• Witcher's medallion pulse.
• Toukiden's Eye of Truth.

Other instances such as

• Gears of War's health indication.
• Destiny getting hit by the Thorn
• Flashbangs in games that have them.

Awkward mocap. Especially in games where the motion captured actions doesn't fit an exaggerated or cartoony aesthetic.

Instantly thought of this shit.

Weapons magically hanging on the backside of people in RPGs..

Like, they don't fly like that, it's annoooooyyyiingggggggggg.

This kind of irritates me too. I'm not sure which I dislike more the pocket of infinite space or this.

 

[Hoya Destroyer]

Not being able to put away/holster my weapons in Mass Effect 3. It annoyed the hell out of me.

 

[Neptonic]

3D games where you take instantly damage if you touch an enemy
Looking at you Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

 

[mitch1971]

Not being able to run and reload at the same time. Annoying. At the very least make it longer for me to reload but please don't stop me from running.

Doors that can only be opened by an npc.

Doors that have a wooden plank over them to lock them, but you can clearly put your hands through the bars and level the wood away, yet I have to traverse half the map to get to the other side.

An uncharted one that pisses me off no end. Why do I need to ask for help to open a large set of doors, yet we end up opening them we both open one side of the door each. You only need to open one of the doors to get through anyway.

 

[duckroll]

Thread's pretty long so I'm sure someone must have mentioned something similar by now, but one of my pet peeves which is really inconsequential is the lack of consistent UI, especially when you save your game. All console OS these days have default built in system interfaces for save file management. But they also allow developers to have custom save interfaces which avoid the default. I really love it when a game has a fully consistent interface even when saving, and everything is seamlessly part of the game's unique UI design. When I see the default system interface pop up, it makes me go "uggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" in my head. Lol.

 

[Savantcore]

Haha, the exact opposite bothers me even more, when a weapon is clipping through a character. Or going between hovering and clipping when moving around.

Clipping in NPCs does my head in. Like, the character has been designed, created, and placed into this world specifically for this one cutscene, and his beard is poking through his collar. If this is the only instance this character appears, why not do it properly?

 

[wrestleman]

Calling the single player story a "campaign" when it's not a military shooter. There's a reason they called them campaigns in those games. It sounds pretentious to me to call the story mode of a platformer the "campaign" and I hate when people do it.

 

[redcrayon]

Weapons magically hanging on the backside of people in RPGs..

Like, they don't fly like that, it's annoooooyyyiingggggggggg.

Dragon Age is hilarious the way mages have their staff hover behind them. I kind of get that it's supposed to represent shouldered weapons, which works ok for a shield, but a pole-arm? It's easier to carry it than strap something taller than you to your back. Having said that, would creating a set of scabbards for swords and whatnot really have been too much to ask considering the relatively nice layered leather and chain armour elsewhere? I suspect it's down to them not wanting weapon design restricted to working with their scabbard designs, but surely the answer to that is that each weapon has its own personalised scabbard. For a genre that puts a lot of effort in talking about legendary magic weapons, surely they deserve that!

 

[Triggerhappytel]

Not really a petty thing, but something I experienced last night that I wanted to moan about: some of the checkpointing in Wolfenstein: The New Order is baffling.

For example, on the bridge level where you have to get inside the train wreckage there's one section where you fall from the ruined steel beams down onto a stretch of road, and you have to fight your way through literally about 40 enemies (including 3-4 big armoured dudes) with no checkpoint and very little cover. It was a fucking ballache and took me ages to get past, and then once past them there was a checkpoint, then a little tunnel that had a single armoured enemy in, and then another checkpoint once I'd killed him. It was such dumb checkpoint placement and I almost gave up on it because that section was really hard.

 

[PuppetSlave]

I talk to myself when I am alone. Especially when I am solving a problem, it helps to concentrate and find new ways to solve it

There is an term for it. Rubber ducking

*on topic*
Being forced to click an button or similar very fast. Loved that they updated that in the uncharted collection a bit. I have hated that shit since the 80's when playing the Olympic games pc game.

 

[Acquiescence]

Playing as a person who can't speak in a world where everyone else does. Silent protagonists - I hate 'em. Why strip the one character I'll be spending the most company with of any semblance of personality? It's illogical.

Also, games that tell the entire story from the first-person perspective of a faceless main character, a la Resident Evil 7/Bioshock Infinite. Doesn't make for the most dynamic form of storytelling, and the complete absence of reflections in the environments is jarring.

 

[Jerry]

When the game doesn't minimize nicely

 

[poodaddy]

I can't hang with JRPG's anymore simply because they always put me in control of children. It's petty for sure, but I just can't take games seriously where a group of incredibly hormonal yet impossibly beautiful/handsome youngsters who wield immense power march out to save the day with the power of their friendship.

 

[Soul of the Beast]

I can't hang with Japanese games anymore simply because they always put me in control of children. It's petty for sure, but I just can't take games seriously where a group of incredibly hormonal yet impossibly beautiful/handsome youngsters who wield immense power march out to save the day with the power of their friendship.

I guess you mean...JRPG?

 

[Nesther]

Endless handholding, unskippable tutorials with meaningless dialog that seems to be repeating itself. Just stop it, and let me figure it all out on my own if I want to.

 

[poodaddy]

I guess you mean...JRPG?

Yeah I shoulda been more specific. Ill edit it. My Yakuza tag exposes that I adore some Japanese games, and my favorite series of all time is Megaman X; I'm just tired of formulaic ass JRPG's.

 

[Lux R7]

shrine of winter in ds2. Your character can't get through a pile of rubble (or woods).

 

[NiteChylde]

There are a lot of little things that tend to piss me off:

- not being able to select speech and subtitle language via an ingame menu
- animated menu transitions taking ages to navigate from A to B
- no pause and/or skip function for cutscenes
- badly designed inventory menus in games with a lot of loot, e.g. no proper sort functions, no QoL functions like "sell all trash" or "mark for sale"
- ingame maps cluttered with what often feels like 5.6703023 billion different icons and no possibility to disable certain kind of markers
- no possibility to select different measurement units (e.g. imperial or metric units)

I could go on and on with this list. In the end most of my complains basically regard QoL design decisions and I fail to understand why some things are not a standard for all games.

 

[Skyfireblaze]

Not being able to set dialogue to instantly appear so you have confirm twice for every text box to make it appear and then missing some small bits cuz you pressed too fast and it was a short sentence

Want to be friends?

My pet-peeve is starting a PC game up for the first time and the resolution being set to 640x480 Fullscreen like seriously? o.o When I go to my Windows resolution settings it shows Native/Recommended next to 1080p so Windows knows what my monitor optimally does, why can't games ask Windows for that info and set it automatically before launching?

Another one is playing a athletic character that can jump and whatnot but is blocked by a waist-height wall, heck I think I would rather prefer invisible walls here

 

[Wardancer]

High heels everywhere. Particularly in otherwise solid, protective and lore friendly armors.

This, always this... just stop with the %&/€%#"%"# heels in everything.

 

[burnfout]

Thread's pretty long so I'm sure someone must have mentioned something similar by now, but one of my pet peeves which is really inconsequential is the lack of consistent UI, especially when you save your game. All console OS these days have default built in system interfaces for save file management. But they also allow developers to have custom save interfaces which avoid the default. I really love it when a game has a fully consistent interface even when saving, and everything is seamlessly part of the game's unique UI design. When I see the default system interface pop up, it makes me go "uggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" in my head.

Lol.

This annoys me as well. Now in FFXII I really hate manually saving.

Also the two button presses after a save was made, ugh.

 

[Scrawnton]

Having to scroll linear menus with the joystick when the d-pad has zero functionality at all. It ruins the feel of games. It bugs me to this day that Dragon Age Inquisition does this.

 

[FantasticMrSnake]

No jump button. As a developer you may think your game doesn't need jumping, but you're wrong.

Ni no kuni got this really well!

 

[Shift!]

Floaty movement. I couldn't stomach Fable 2 because it felt like the MC was always walking on ice.

I stopped playing so many games because of this. Halo 4 had this stupid floaty movement that basically made you a walking headshot second you jumped.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WaQkT7aQGno?t=03m53s

 

[kqedequalsvolvo]

Can survive a 30 foot drop but can't climb over a 2 foot log.

Haha, for sure, it's still something that bothers me a lot in games. Recently been playing Mafia 3 (I loved it, certainly not knocking it) and i've had plenty of moments where I've escaped hostile enemies/cops, sprung over big fences, aired my car over humped bridges, hidden behind all kinds of obstacles seemlessly with intuitive ease...but have been shot in the back as Lincoln cannot physically deal with a foot high ledge if it's diagonal.

Relatively minor and less of a gameplay thing, but the lack of normalisation of X and O buttons on Japanese and Western games gets frustrating. I'm not disputing the reasons behind it and I'd be just as happy with X as confirm as O. But if you've gone from one game to another and you're tilting and you press the wrong button and get pushed back to the main menu when you're just trying to restart something....oh man.

 

[Vismund Cygnus]

Skill trees and RPG systems in games that don't need them.

Ubisoft towers and endless pointless tat collectibles in games that don't need them.

Please stop making all AAA titles identical.

YES! Tacked on, just to call them RPGs!! Feels like a scam.

 

[Ravelle]

Games like like Uncharted in which the screen goes black/red when you're near death.

"Oh you're having trouble on this combat section? Here let us make it even worse by narrowing down your vision!"

Most of my Uncharted deaths were caused because I couldn't see shit.

Unskippable cutscenes.

Even worse, unusable cut scenes.

"Oh, I have to go out for a but I'm in the middle of this cutscene, I'l just pause it--oh it just skipped it."

 

[Zen_Arcade]

Unskippable cut scenes. Especially if you've already seen them before.

 

[KORNdoggy]

small environmental elements that seem to have collision boxes around them that are all too big. so you get caught on a small brick protruding 5 inches high, or a small bush needs to be given a wide birth because it can stop your character in his/her tracks. just bad collision in general really, i hate getting caught up in the environment, especially in high stress situations.

 

[crazy monkey]

Long time between save points. I don't have time.

 

[MaulerX]

I hate having to see a horse run up and down a mountain like nothing, but the moment I mount him he won't go further than two feet into it. Happened to me in BOTW. What's up with that?

 

[Semajer]

I hate NPC dialogue that changes after you've read it with no option to reread.

 

[Screaming Meat]

The obligatory "dream" sequence in cinematic games where near the end you dream about your friends/family to show your main character is very insecure, by making you pushing the left stick and nothing else.

- God of War 3
- Life is Strange
- Uncharted 3 (although it has a bit of shooting)
- Max Payne 1 and 2
- Mass Effect 3
- GTA V

Some of these examples are a bit different but please find another way to develop your characters.

Surely Max Payne gets a pass (well, 2 at the very least)? I think fucked up dream sequences are pretty prominent in Noir fiction.

 

[Tiops]

When you try to load a Save and the confirmation window cursor starts at "No". Holy shit that pisses me off lmao.

Zodiac Age save screen is terrible and I complain every time I have to save or load.

 

[cryptosporidium]

I stopped playing SFV because Chun's neutral stace has her clothes clip through her leg.

 

[Couchaddict]

Pegging the game language to the console default language.

Please let me have the game in english & the console in something else.

 

[SoulUnison]

I hate when a character's available movement speeds are inappropriate for common settings and/or there's no button to hold/toggle movement states and/or the analog scaling is sudden and pointlessly sensitive.

As much as Persona 5 nailed, controlling the MC never feels "right" except in wide open areas, but you spend most of the game in alleys, hallways, normal sized rooms, etc.

Running is too fast and floaty, and the only way to walk is to just BARELY touch the analog stick to a degree that continued intentional "walking" causes hand cramps and/or having the MC stutter around like he's seizing up.

 

[Triggerhappytel]

No jump button. As a developer you may think your game doesn't need jumping, but you're wrong.

This especially bothers me in FPSs. I really feel like that viewpoint needs to give full control to the player, and it's weird when you can't do something as simple as a jump. Granted, I don't recall the last FPS I've seen it in that wasn't about a decade ago.

Probably the only games I don't mind there being no jump in is Miyazaki's Bloodborne/Dark Souls/Demon's Souls, and that's because the level design is so good it doesn't really seem to matter.

 

[deo]

Skill trees and RPG systems in games that don't need them.

Ubisoft towers and endless pointless tat collectibles in games that don't need them.

Please stop making all AAA titles identical.

Will you marry me ?

Me too?

Nearly every game has them now. Jesus...

And enemy AI that has aim bot and can kill you in 5 seconds tops in GTA. That isnt fun