Question What standard gaming conventions annoy you?

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Zloth

Community Contributor
Motion Blur being On by default. I can't for the life of me figure out, who would want that on. I get headaches if I ever play any game with that on.
I just got a mod to turn it off in FF7 Remake. But headaches?? Are you just being dramatic?
Having a low amount of save slots. There's no real technical reason to limit the amount of save slots to anything under 1000 as far as I'm aware.
Well, file size would be a reason for some games. X4 save files are about 120MB (more if you turn off compression). The GUI comes to mind, too. If you want people to intelligently select from 1000 items, a straight up list isn't going to work very well. If you don't want them to select from tons of items, why allow them?

Oh, but that reminds me of a BIG annoyance that is exactly off topic: a complete lack of a standard for where to put save games! Do they go under Documents? Documents/My Games? Somewhere in the hidden App Data directory? In the Steam directory structure?? Ever since Microsoft decreed that no save data should go in the game's install folder, it has been insane! You've got to look it up for every game.
 
I just got a mod to turn it off in FF7 Remake. But headaches?? Are you just being dramatic?
Well, file size would be a reason for some games. X4 save files are about 120MB (more if you turn off compression). The GUI comes to mind, too. If you want people to intelligently select from 1000 items, a straight up list isn't going to work very well. If you don't want them to select from tons of items, why allow them?

How much room the saves takes up on my computer shouldn't be the game developer's concern. Though it would probably be a good idea to give players an idea of how much space they're using for their saves.

As for the GUI, I have no problem with scrolling through a list of saves. Just list some relevant information about where the player was in the story/on the map to help select the right save.
 
Another one is the insistence that 'Follow me' NPCs will always walk at a different pace, so you're stop-starting the whole trip. Yeah, just had such last night—Grr!
Yeah, I really hate it that NPCs that you're supposed to follow almost always walk so slow. But then every once in a great while, you'll get one that goes so fast you can't keep up. But the slow ones are very annoying.
 
Escort missions (meaning a mission where you need to assist somebody in getting from A to B, and that somebody can be attacked and killed) are never any good, at least in my experience. Some were up to "OK I guess" but never good.
I hate those kinds of quests. If they run away during combat, that's okay, but the ones where they try to join in the fighting and get themselves killed really annoys me. They've got no skills and garbage weapons (if any) but still try to attack. Sacred 2 had some of those, and I've run into three of those situations in my current game of Wasteland 2.

The worst one in that game (so far), was trying to retrieve some cows for a group of people in Damonta, and they sent one of their members with me. Of course, we had to fight through several waves of robots (some of which had 500+ hit points) and the guy they sent had 58, a garbage gun, and had to get in the thick of the combat. The hardest part of those battles was trying to keep him alive.
 
Gear(armor, weapons, etc) in RPGs that you need to be at a certain level to use.

It annoys me that when I find for example a new sword in medieval style RPGs that I can't use it because I haven't reached that level yet. It's a sword, it weighs, and works the same way my old sword does. Why can't I use it?

Which brings me to another thing that annoys me, and that is when the enemies levels with you. I want the enemies to have the same level(with variations) throughout the whole game. I don't need them to have lower stats in the beginning and better stats as the game goes on. This annoys me with especially the Elder Scrolls, Oblivion and Skyrim. Suddenly all enemies are high level and everyone drops high end gear. Morrowind was fine in this regard iirc.
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
The levelling thing is necessary for making an open world where you can choose where to go. When you leave the cave in Skyrim, you can go any direction you want. If you turn around and go the opposite way the game is pushing you, you'll find enemies and quests that you can do. With not-so-open-world games, going the wrong way takes you into the teeth of things you can't handle, so - despite the lack of walls - you go the same way everybody else goes. Is that really an open world?

I think it is possible to get the open feeling without the level scaling. For instance, you could just make everything close to the starting point easy, then have it get progressively harder as you get further away. So, if I just keep going north, I'll see harder and harder enemies/quests until I get to the goal (presumably a ring around the starting point). But what happens to the person that goes south? Do they see the same enemies and quests? If so, then your world isn't really open - you've just made every direction the same linear hallway. If not, the developers are going to have to make a TON of high level content to fill up the huge outer regions. That is possible, but not economically sane.

Level scaling makes it so you can go north, then east, then south - whatever you like - and you'll see different things while getting challenged the whole time. It's more work to have several options for each encounter, but it will be spread evenly instead of having your developers spending the lion's share of their time working on end level content that most players never see.
 
The levelling thing is necessary for making an open world where you can choose where to go. When you leave the cave in Skyrim, you can go any direction you want. If you turn around and go the opposite way the game is pushing you, you'll find enemies and quests that you can do. With not-so-open-world games, going the wrong way takes you into the teeth of things you can't handle, so - despite the lack of walls - you go the same way everybody else goes. Is that really an open world?

I think it is possible to get the open feeling without the level scaling. For instance, you could just make everything close to the starting point easy, then have it get progressively harder as you get further away. So, if I just keep going north, I'll see harder and harder enemies/quests until I get to the goal (presumably a ring around the starting point). But what happens to the person that goes south? Do they see the same enemies and quests? If so, then your world isn't really open - you've just made every direction the same linear hallway. If not, the developers are going to have to make a TON of high level content to fill up the huge outer regions. That is possible, but not economically sane.

Level scaling makes it so you can go north, then east, then south - whatever you like - and you'll see different things while getting challenged the whole time. It's more work to have several options for each encounter, but it will be spread evenly instead of having your developers spending the lion's share of their time working on end level content that most players never see.

To me it's the complete opposite. I don't get an open world feeling when the levels are scaled down to my level. Everything stays the same. When you don't have scaling, you get the chance to get good loot early(if you are brave and good), but it also makes you aware of your environment, and back off. It makes exploring a whole lot more exciting.
 
Which brings me to another thing that annoys me, and that is when the enemies levels with you. I want the enemies to have the same level(with variations) throughout the whole game. I don't need them to have lower stats in the beginning and better stats as the game goes on. This annoys me with especially the Elder Scrolls, Oblivion and Skyrim. Suddenly all enemies are high level and everyone drops high end gear. Morrowind was fine in this regard iirc.

See also https://forums.pcgamer.com/threads/non-linear-rpgs-or-are-they.3292
 
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Got another one, i dont think ive seen it mentioned but, games where you cant just quit to desktop from in game. The current perpetrator of this is OUTRIDERS. You have to open a whole menu, select "quit to lobby" to exit to a lobby which takes a couple seconds to load, and then to exit you have to hit a key (not escape like sane normal games have) only to be asked "are you sure you want to quit to desktop?". Literally 30 seconds of trying to exit a game, longer if you dont have a fast pc. If i cant hit escape and have the option to quit to desktop and have it go right away from there, in game, you are doing it wrong. Then again, this game has done a lot wrong.
 
I thought of one that is really annoying. It has to do with controllers, and not keyboard and mouse, though. I hate it that every single game defaults to vertical controls not being inverted. If you're playing with a controller, vertical controls should always be inverted.
 
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I thought of one that is really annoying. It has to do with controllers, and not keyboard and mouse, though. I hate it that every single game defaults to vertical controls not being inverted. If you're playing with a controller, vertical controls should always be inverted.

Byt why? I recently played Aer: Memories of Old and had to uninvert the vertical controls so my daughter could play. It seems uninverted is more intuitive.
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
So, you're walking along in some action RPG, admiring a new town. Off to the side, you notice an odd thing: a big, open area, perfectly flat, with maybe a few obstacles placed around it. There will be a large fight there, of course, and it's starting to get pretty annoying.

Horizon: Zero Dawn had a huge one for fighting a giant mecha-worm. There was a quest that went along with it that tried to play at being some sort of mystery about what happened to some miners, but anyone that's played action games before is going to know some really big monster is going to attack. It shows up in shooters, too. If you're going through hallways and small rooms (especially ones with puzzles in them), you'll only be bothered by small enemies. When you see it open up into a big room, save your game immediately.

I'm not real sure what to do about the problem, but the way games just announce "you will be having a big fight right in this spot" well before the fight starts is getting under my skin.
 
Not a common standard these days but i still hate to see it. Finding Secrets is mandatory to progress. This pisses me off immensely as its a flimsy excuse to make a game harder then it should be .

At worse, it means that your gameplay/progressions comes to a grinding halt. bonus black marks when secrets are not immediately obvious and its trial and error hugging walls, finding invisible walls, solving obnoxiously difficult random actions to make something happen.

It all smacks of poor game design and balance if its impossible playing normally and the game doesn't give you enough resources to beat it.

La mulana i'm looking at you. the amount of BS is a massive turn off. making the game harder then it should be. infact, i would argue its harder then dark souls and i bow down to anyone who can beat this game without a walkthrough of any kind.
 
I'm not real sure what to do about the problem, but the way games just announce "you will be having a big fight right in this spot" well before the fight starts is getting under my skin.


Honestly i would prefer to be forewarned then stumble into a boss fight not realizing that i'm ill prepared for it. yes it kinda ruins the surprise, but i rather have the chance to save everything instead of the risk of losing massive chunks of progress. If there are multiple auto checkpoints i might not be so upset, but in games where there aren't any, i'll take the save game spot.
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
Oh, boss fights can be plenty fun! It's just that the rooms/arenas they set up for the fights are so contrived that bugs me. How about a couple of examples from FF7R....

In one section of the slums, there's a path that leads to Aerith's house. Along the side of the path, you'll find a gate. The gate is locked, but behind it you can see a big, circular area that's completely flat and bare. OBVIOUS boss fight that way. There's no reason at all for an area like that to exist in that part of the slums - its sole reason to be there is because the developers want a boss battle near Aerith's house without actually being near Aerith's house, which isn't at all flat and even has a pond and a stream. I don't like that at all.

However, another slum actually has a coliseum for big fights. Unlike the strangely empty area near Aerith's house, the coliseum is underground, so you don't see it coming as soon as you walk into town. What's more, given the culture that's grown up in that area of town, it makes pretty good sense that they would have something like that. I like that one fine because it fits into the world nicely instead of being carved out of the lore just so a boss battle can take place in a spot that's convenient. It's still just a big, flat, circular area the same as Aerith's arena, but it fits.

P.S. The original FF7 didn't have to deal with this. When fights took place, the whole graphics engine changes, and the battle takes place with your three characters on one side and the enemies on another. There's no immersion to break.
 
Oh, boss fights can be plenty fun! It's just that the rooms/arenas they set up for the fights are so contrived that bugs me. How about a couple of examples from FF7R....

In one section of the slums, there's a path that leads to Aerith's house. Along the side of the path, you'll find a gate. The gate is locked, but behind it you can see a big, circular area that's completely flat and bare. OBVIOUS boss fight that way. There's no reason at all for an area like that to exist in that part of the slums - its sole reason to be there is because the developers want a boss battle near Aerith's house without actually being near Aerith's house, which isn't at all flat and even has a pond and a stream. I don't like that at all.

However, another slum actually has a coliseum for big fights. Unlike the strangely empty area near Aerith's house, the coliseum is underground, so you don't see it coming as soon as you walk into town. What's more, given the culture that's grown up in that area of town, it makes pretty good sense that they would have something like that. I like that one fine because it fits into the world nicely instead of being carved out of the lore just so a boss battle can take place in a spot that's convenient. It's still just a big, flat, circular area the same as Aerith's arena, but it fits.

P.S. The original FF7 didn't have to deal with this. When fights took place, the whole graphics engine changes, and the battle takes place with your three characters on one side and the enemies on another. There's no immersion to break.

Ah, that I agree with. It's annoying in general when game elements are poorly integrated into the world and that is a good example.
 
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Zloth

Community Contributor
There's always a lot of talk about voice acting being bad in video games. But what about the animations?
View: https://youtu.be/3EA1MJjEaPw

That is just TOO MUCH MOVEMENT! It's certainly not just a FF7R thing, either. This bit gets a little bit of an excuse because they're being silly, and exaggeration helps make it funny, but games overdo it mighty often.

Maybe it comes from the past, when characters couldn't make any facial expressions at all.

P.S. Got a sense of deja vu here, but oh well.
 
There's always a lot of talk about voice acting being bad in video games. But what about the animations?
View: https://youtu.be/3EA1MJjEaPw

That is just TOO MUCH MOVEMENT! It's certainly not just a FF7R thing, either. This bit gets a little bit of an excuse because they're being silly, and exaggeration helps make it funny, but games overdo it mighty often.

Maybe it comes from the past, when characters couldn't make any facial expressions at all.

P.S. Got a sense of deja vu here, but oh well.
Ok, that does bring something up that is one of my major pet peeves. Why do so many games have weeds that are constantly dancing around? They think it looks like the wind blowing, and it's more realistic, but it looks ridiculous. Weeds don't dance around. They're usually still, and every once in a while the breeze might move them a little.

Look at this video of Genshin Impact around 3:20 for a good example of what I'm talking about.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR65r_4EJyc
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
If I go more than about ten miles west of my house, there's almost always at least a breeze, and often quite a bit of wind. The prairies have plenty of it - hence the whole 'Saudi Arabia of Wind' thing. But the wind doesn't move grasses like that! You can actually see the gusts of wind move along the grass.
View: https://youtu.be/yEn8_X7Ei3A?t=16602

That game is just having them bounce around at random. Kinda sad, but GI isn't exactly a graphics powerhouse.
 

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