Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I’m in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that’s something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
“A large open world to explore!” - by slowly walking or teleporting.
So many games have like ~10-15 seconds of unskippable logos whenever you open the game and it pisses me off every single time. I don’t understand why they still do this.
On PC, often those are short videos. If you can find those files, you can remove the file and they won’t play. Pcgamerwiki is helpful
They’re almost always .bik files somewhere in the game directory. I have no clue why so many games still insist on using this specific format in particular even today, but at least it makes them easy to find. I have determined that quite a few games will barf if you delete the files outright, but if you just replace them with an empty text file with the same name it will still allow the game to launch.
Console players are usually out of luck.
I hadn’t heard of PCGamerWiki before, and it looks super useful. Thanks!
Money changed hands, so they have to show them. It’s advertising for the other companies that they worked with, or building up brand recognition for the publisher, etc. In the best case scenario, they mask a load screen, but I’ve found plenty where they don’t even start loading until after the unskippable logos.
I’d really like to see a set of publishers/creators that take a hard line stance on this, and reject contracts with, eg, Speedtree, if they insist on a dedicated startup video.
Kudos to Arc Raiders. When I boot it up, aside from an EAC launcher logo, it goes straight to Speranza.
Iirc Masahiro Sakurai (the guy from smash bros) openly stated to he refused to work with dolby in Kirby in the forgotten land because they insisted their logo be plastered before the title screen.
Unpausable and unskippable cutscenes
God, yes… it’s literally an interactive medium… like, I AM the story, motherfuckers 😂
Been playing Monster hunter World recently and holy crap is that game obnoxious with the cutscenes, even mid-fight if a monster you’ve never seen before happens to wander past.
Unpausable is unforgivable in the modern age but I generally don’t mind unskippable if and only if it’s the first time the scene plays on a profile.
- Games that offer stealth as an option over combat, but have mandatory combat bosses.
- games that have excessive grinding as part of the main gameplay.
- Games where randomness is the primary factor in winning and losing.
Games that offer stealth as an option over combat, but have mandatory combat bosses.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a great game, but this was a serious issue. The game has a (notoriously buggy) achievement for finishing the game without killing anyone, but every boss requires a loadout of lethal weapons to take down, leaving a minimum of slots for non-lethal alternatives. Very annoying.
I hate RNG so much 😂 I don’t get it. Life has too much RNG, I play video games because it’s a predominantly skill-based controlled environment.
It’s like picking up a piano and there’s a 35% chance F# is just F every time you play the damn note 😂
I guess it makes sense if you’re role playing and want your experience to mimic real life, which is why they’re mostly used in RPGs, but I also feel so immersed playing skill-based games without RNG, so I can’t assess its actual value.
The reason they’re in RPGs is the same reason they’re in any other genre. In a war game, you could be a tactical genius, but the RNG is there to simulate dumb luck, so the game is about forcing you to play the odds, because victory is almost never guaranteed. When the result is deterministic, there can often be a single 100% correct answer, and RNG throws a wrench in that. Something similar can be applied to loot games, where you’re rolling with the punches based on what you’ve found.
I’m just glad my favorite games don’t have any of this and are still infinitely replayable.
Would you mind listing some of those? Because that’s a tough bar to clear.
Ayyy, I love linking to Gamebrary: https://gamebrary.com/b/pUM4ceVfPR2l9K2qqLDN
I mean, character action games and score chasers do tend to fall in that optimal answer bucket. You’re free to freestyle and get a lower score, but without RNG, there will be one way to play that always works. If that counts as infinitely replayable, then so does any other game you enjoy. And for fighting games, that RNG is just substituted for your opponents’ decision making.
You’re free to freestyle and get a lower score, but without RNG, there will be one way to play that always works.
Most score you on style as well, not just efficiency. And massive breadth and depth of combat interactions yield more than one way that works, not just one. Even for shmups, routing can vary depending on the player, their skill, and understanding of the game. It’s not a timid sandbox wherein only one way works.
If that counts as infinitely replayable, then so does any other game you enjoy.
Keyword is enjoy. I don’t see myself replaying DMC5 for as long as I’ve been playing some of my favorite games because I enjoy it less.
And for fighting games, that RNG is just substituted for your opponents’ decision making.
Hmm… how does that work? I hit my opponent, they take damage, no Xcom bullshit. I don’t see any RNG-like behavior in this interaction.
I don’t mind RNG, I mind games that rely on it over proper design. Xcom has tons of RNG, but it’s generally still possible to win most maps with proper strategy. Most roguelikes have this problem where any given run is impossible to win regardless of play.
Point no. 2 is why I couldn’t get through Witcher 1. There’s only so many times I can fight 3-5 sewer monsters to get enough XP to not die in chapter…4? 5?
Sounds like Baldur’s Gate 3.
You’ve described like 90% of modern gaming.
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Games that jump straight into things without letting me see the options menu first.
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Not having the Playstation icons as a preset when I want to use my PS4 controller on PC.
Skipping straight to action instead of main menu and options is annoying.
When I started playing [game name here, atm can’t remember it, it’s from warframe people] it immediately started a plot cutscene which wasn’t available later on. I sure wanted to see that plot presented in a 720p medium settings on my large 1440p display.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things the plot in the game is irrelevant as it can be, but damn it, let me enjoy it full screen.
They have likely fixed, but holy hell, why was it like that in the first place. Abysmal new player experience.
Yeah, I don’t like being shoved in an intro cinematic without being able to turn on subtitles.
Unless I missed it, Where Winds Meet forces you to do an entire damn boss-fight before you can invert the vertical camera! Unbelievable. I realize I’m the freak for learning “flight control” aiming where down is up, but I’ve been doing it for decades; can’t change it now! It’s unhinged to not let people access or change options until after you’ve beaten a boss…
I had to force the PS5 glyphs by creating a Game.ini file and inserting the appropriate lines to get the ps instead of Xbox button glyphs for my ds4 in Clair obscur the other day. It was definitely annoying.
Thanks to searching for a solution to that I found a mod to remove the abysmal sharpening, uncap cutscene frame rate, and remove pillar boxes on my 21:9 display though, so it all worked out.
I can’t remember specific examples (probably because I didn’t stick with any of them very long), but I’ve played several games that don’t even let you touch the options until after you’ve finished some tutorial section… which is especially annoying for players who play with inverted y axis.
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Menu -> Exit Game -> Yes
Scroll Down - > Exit Game -> Yes
Scroll Down -> Exit to Desktop -> Yes
Exit Launcher -> Yes
Jackbox is one of the worst offenders of this. Have to exit 4 times to actually exit the game.
Yeah, but accidentally clicking the quit button when you meant to click options or whatever and the game just instantly dropping you at the desktop is equally as annoying. Two click exit is a good compromise. Four is way too many though.
Alt+F4 is your friend!
Or on Steam Deck, quit the game using the steam menu.
I do appreciate the games that give you quit and quit to desktop in the same menu.
Any game ported to the PC needs to recognize controllers that are plugged in after launch and need to have a “quit to desktop” option.
Absolutely, especially with handheld PC gaming becoming more popular. Drives me nuts having to fiddle with settings just to get it functional only to realize I missed something that was critical for a game play mechanic
I have many pet peeves when it comes to games, but the biggest that I can think of off the top of my head is the boss fights in games that don’t let you use the weapons & skills/techniques that you’d used to get to that point. It just pisses me off when they let you develop a character with particular skills and weapons only to force a particular combat style that’s contrary to what you’d used up till that point.
RPGs are absolutely terrible about giving you the ability to inflict status effects on enemies, but not giving random encounter enemies enough HP to justify inflicting statuses, and then also making the bosses immune to them.
Deus Ex Human Revolution’s initial release was the worst about this. A bunch of people who took the skills and inventory for non-lethal/stralth/hacking gameplay found themselves at boss fights that were straight-up gunfights. If you were kitted out and skilled properly to face-tank while using explosives and big guns, you were just screwed and couldn’t progress.
In subsequent releases, they added additional options in the arenas that allowed you to kill them using stealth and hacking skills.
Cyberpunk 2077 one of the quests in the expansion drops you into basically Alien: Isolation when up until that point you can beat the shit out of or hack the brains out of any other NPC you’ve come across. You go from being a cybered out demigod to basically a rat in a maze being chased by a giant metal invincible doberman.
That was mine too. I hated it. I was playing to feel like a badass in Night City, not to scamper around and hide like a rat until the invincible robot catches me and drills into my face again. I was so happy to finally get out of there. Not because i beat it, but because it was finally OVER.
Yeah, I played that. Didn’t bother me as much as some boss fights though. They clearly didn’t intend for you to fight that robot, so the only option was to sneak around it and I rather enjoy stealth gameplay.
I don’t mind stealth but i usually play a solo in cyberpunk and my gameplay is often just tank hits and blast everyone with my shotgun or LMG. So to go from that to being forced into stealth is a real shock.
Holy shit, action games and giant bosses you can’t juggle… I love Bayonetta, but goddamn… Jeanne aside, some of the worst bosses in the genre.
Assault Spy was awesome for letting you juggle literally every boss in the game.
This is why I’d almost rather linear games that teach one core mechanic rather than “Build your character the way you want them”.
Biggest pet peeve of modern games is when the game repeatedly nags the player to go to the next mission or solve a puzzle. I like to explore games, to take the time to appreciate well made environments and lore, but when npcs or even the pc keep chiming in every minute with “[x] is waiting for me at the lab” or “I think I should [y]”, it starts to piss me off.
It’s like they don’t trust the player to play the game “right”. Games are more than just sprinting from one objective to another. Can’t even take the time to fully look over a puzzle before the game starts telling you what to do next.
“Quick! A giant meteor is heading for our planet! Collision is expected in less than a week!”
…but if I sleep 7 times while doing all this level grinding and doing sidequests, nothing goes wrong…
That’s a quirk of the medium I’ve learned to accept. Some games do it well by having chunks of “on-rails” bits and others of “free-roam” based on what’s happening in the story so that it makes more sense.
You’re completely right of course, but I’ll say it bugs me too at times. I was always able to forgive it but as we got more advanced visually it bugged me more. Then finally in Oblivion it was too much for me. I still love and respect the game, but it actively bugs me there are portals around the world that are just waiting for me to decide I want to fight. I know it’s dumb, but it is what it is.
Single saves. Me and husband have one computer (we’re broke?) and too many games have a single save. So we can’t play that game trading off cause there’s only one save. Like Baldur’s Gate 3? Amazing. Billion saves, hell a billion for each character even. Heaven’s Vault? Wild Bastards? One save. Guh.
Nintendo is infamous for this. Animal Crossing is a great game on the Switch, but it’s meant for one person. You can join an island, but unless the island creator has everything unlocked, you can’t progress the game. And even if they have, there are certain recipes you can’t get without cheating (treasure islands) for some reason.
Pokémon is the same way. They literally want you to buy a second Switch.
Oh yes, wasn’t even thinking of that. Part of my twins gift to me of New Horizons was the promise they wouldn’t play the game as well because it’s one island and it’s miiiiine. So many other games on the switch, just use a profile and bam! New game! Bah Nintendo.
You can create/use multiple users on the Switch itself, are the saves then not separate?
Yes, but in the case of some games, the save data is shared.
I don’t have a Pokémon game on Switch, so I can’t speak to it directly.
On Animal Crossing, the first player goes through an orientation scene at the airport where they are told they won an island getaway package. They create their character, and then they choose an island shape from four randomly generated choices. Once all that’s done, you fly to the island and get to see the airport colour (this matters to some people), the native fruit (determines what recipes you can make, and some have preferences), and who your starter animal villagers (always a Big Sister personality female and a Jock personality male) will be. Sometimes you don’t like one of those, so you reset. I had to reset seven times to get an island I wanted (blue airport, oranges, and I forget who my starters were now — they have both moved away).
So anyway, the second player does not get the orientation and the island picker. Instead, their orientation has them joining the first player’s island. The first player will always be the “Island Representative” and this is the only player Tom Nook (the racoon “boss” of the island, so to speak) will talk to about upgrades for the island and features you can unlock by completing simple quests. The other player(s) will have access to these once the “island representative” has unlocked them, but if they required learning a recipe, the other players will NOT be given that recipe. They can find it randomly in a message bottle on the beach, shot down from a balloon by a slingshot, or from a villager who is crafting something. Or, they can get it from another player, such as a hacked player running a treasure island where you can get ALL the recipes.
Case in point: My wife’s island. My wife bought the Switch for Animal Crossing, then decided she did not like Animal Crossing (it IS kind of a slow and pointless “chill” game), so she stopped playing. She unlocked a couple things, but I could not unlock anything else. So she agreed to let me delete her island and start a new one.
Case in point 2: My island. I’ve been playing my own island since May. EVERYTHING is unlocked. So she can start a new character, move onto my island, and have access to all the features. There may be a few things she can’t craft because she doesn’t have the recipe, and the game is less likely to spawn a recipe the island rep got for free (it’s considered lower priority).
Sorry for the long reply, just wanted to clarify how it actually works. This is intentional: for “personal” games like Pokémon and Animal Crossing, Nintendo fully expects the second player to buy their own Switch and their own copy of the game. Once you’ve done that, you’re both island reps on your own islands, and you can visit each other over a local connection (no paid Nintendo Switch Online account required!). Now this is where it’s super important to make sure your second island does not have the same native fruit. There are five fruits (orange, apple, cherry, peach, and pear) and you will always have a native fruit, your fruit trees only grow this. You will have a secondary fruit your “mom” will send you and other villagers will gift you, and mystery islands have a low percentage chance of spawning. Once you figure out what those two are, you want to make sure the second island doesn’t use either as its native… and hope its secondary isn’t the same either. Then, you can trade fruits, and now you have access to four. You’ll need to trade with at least two other players to get access to all five fruits. (There are also coconuts but everyone is guaranteed to get those.)
i can confirm that pokémon is normal and lets you have multiple switch accounts with one save each on one console. which is actually a big improvement, because pokémon never let you have multiple saves on one cartridge, so on older consoles you did have to buy multiple cartridges! (thankfully you could share the console because the save was on the cartridge, not the console)
on switch, animal crossing is the only game i can think of where there’s only one save per console. and even then, i think they added save slots in the latest update
5 years later… meh. better late than never i guess.
For some reason, no. Not for things like Animal Crossings New Horizons. It’s the same island so the same save so to speak. If my twin started playing the game on their profile, they could do whatever they wanted to my island because it’s the same island.
Hey have you tried Steam Family or whatever it’s called? You can make a new user and they have access to all of your game library. Only one account would be able to play at a time but it would solve your save file dilemma - games files are in the common folder but save files are in the user folder
[EDIT] Steam Families
When you join a Steam Family, you automatically gain access to the shareable games that your family members own and they will also be able to access the shareable titles in your library. […]
Best of all, when you are playing a game from your family library, you will create your own saved games, earn your own Steam achievements, have access to workshop files and more.
Since they just have the one pc, they should be able to just make a second user on the pc then sign in to the single steam account. The new user won’t have any save files in the local user directories, so the game gets launched and you’ll only see the “second” set of saves. No idea how this would work with cloud saves on the steam side though.
You would have to completely disable cloud saves for this which is risky.
That would be even more work IMO
Unless they want to separate their non-game files, too
Wait, so how does that work for games that store saves in ‘c:\users%user%\my documents’ and stuff? That’s why I assumed they’d also need a separate user account on the pc.
Good question. At the very least, steam will cloud sync it regardless of where it’s at on the drive so that’s an option
This might have been the issue as well? All the saves were in the Cloud. But I’m not very techy. While I can follow instructions (I think), software seems to hate me. The hardware, we’re friends!
If that was the issue then doing two separate user accounts on the PC, then having a primary steam account (the existing one with all the games) and a secondary new one, and putting them into a Steam family together just like the person I replied to said would be functionally equivalent to yall having two separate PCs with your own steam accounts when it comes to saves and steam achievements and stuff, but you only need to buy and install the game once. It’ll also let you have separate config files so if one person like controls bound one way and the other another you’re not having to rebind each time yall swap who is playing and everything.
Edit - I, as an adult, took shrooms then accidentally overwrote my dad’s Skyrim save file on his PS3 back in the day and I felt terrible about it :/. I totally understand how annoying save handling can be.
Rebound keys is important because husband has cerebral palsy and needs to heavily modify the layout, that’s good then!
So many games also don’t allow that as well, multiple key maps!
Internet for single player.
I love Hitman, but the need to be connected to a server just to play rubs me the wrong way.
Any game that makes me hold a button for a simple interaction. Bonus points if it has some kind of “progress bar” to show just how much longer you need to hold that button down.
Why did I need to hold X/whatever just to press the thing that opens the door? Why did I have to hold that button down for a grand total of 4 seconds before you actually did your little interaction animation? Why couldn’t it just be a button press?
Part of me kinda blames Halo, as that’s the first game I can remember where it was “hold button to interact;” except in every Halo game up until 4, it was only slightly longer than a normal button press so it was still incredibly quick.
ETA: I hate the extra stuff in Mafia 3 for exactly this reason, which kind of ties into what I said above: it doesn’t respect my, the player’s, time. That stupid “lockpicking” mini game where you break into those junction boxes? Why the hell do I have to wait for the bars to line up before I can break the lock?
And then getting in and out of vehicles plays an animation that takes way too long imo. Which sucks because a lot of the other collectibles are spread out around the map in such a way that it makes it too long to go around on foot gathering them, but it’s also annoying to try to get them with a vehicle because then you need to deal with the animation and then having to run around and grab the damn thing.
I would add to this in game “cutscenes” where the game is doing exposition and the only thing you’re doing is pressing move forward because you need to follow the character who is doing the exposition dump. It’s fine and immersive the first time around but on subsequent playthroughs it gets annoying. It’s essentially a cutscene that you can’t even skip because technically you’re playing the game, but really you’re just holding down a button
Depends on the game. I play Jump Space that occasionally does this (not all buttons, but some). It is to ensure that you deal with enough enemies so they won’t interrupt you while holding/charging the button. If you’re interrupted, you need to start over. It ensures you don’t simply sprint past everything while hitting the buttons.
Sure, sometimes it kinda makes sense from a mechanic or gameplay perspective. I’m talking about games that require you to hold buttons to interact for everything whether it makes sense or not.
A lot of those are just hidden loading screens. Same with those sections of games where you squeeze through a crevice.
- Games should have some way to take notes in game.
- External wikis are great and I love them, but they aren’t an excuse for not explaining how your game works within your game. There needs to be good in game guides.
- All games need some way to save and quit. Looking at you, rogue likes. People have lives. That’s more important than protecting some weird form of honor by making the excuse that it’s to prevent save scumming.
Games that don’t act like they are games. Too many designers think they are making “high art”. Examples:
Not being able to save any time for any reason - I have a life, stuff happens. I need to be able to save and leave the game at any time - during gameplay, dungeons, cutscenes, any time. Make it a suspend state if it must - but respect reality.
Non-pausable cutscenes - you are not the most important part of my life so you need to be able to pause without losing content.
Non-skippable cutscenes - I might have seen this 10 times before, let me skip.
Dialogue history - if you let me skip dialogue then you must have a dialogue history. I might have hit the skip button by accident so let me see what I missed.
Indicate when there isn’t new dialogue - make the chat options change when there is new dialogue, making it so I have to interact with the NPC or object again just to see if there is new dialogue is infuriating.
Show when an activity will fail - don’t make me search barrels that are empty. Skyrim does this perfectly.
If you have a map let me annotate it - somehow a magicly populating map is allowed in your world but I don’t have a pencil to write “come back here with a shovel”?
Three first ones can also be game engine limitations. Im not saying its good desing and its always because the limitations, but there might be more happening under the hood that does not show to the end user. Things like quest stage flags or loading things behind the cut scenes.
Dialogue history i agree completelly. I love the way pillars of the eternity did this. I also loved how text refering to things like cities, characters and gods were highlighted and you could see short summary hovering your mouse over the higlighted text and clicking it opened the codex where you could read about the topic. This helped me immerse to game because my character would what the capital of the country is or what god uggapugga is. Also it helped when there was long times between game sessions.
About map markers. I like when i can add markers or text on the game map, but inherently i think game should do these things for you, either adding a symbol in the map, or adding something in to games quest log or codex. But on the other hand i lived in a era where if i wanted a map for game i needed to draw it by myself on the grid paper. The habit has stayed with me and in games like Dark souls, Remnant and blue prince i keep small notebook with me, where i write my notes and stupid theories. To me its really fun to read those scribles later and try to figure out what i have missed or how dumb i was.
Hollow knight, Project Zomboid, minecraft and Legend of Grimrock have all very different tools for you marking your map and in all of them the map system is part of the game desing and gameplay loop. While these games benefit from the map system to most of the games its just unnecessary. The ability to mark “digging spot #31” just is not necessary.
I love how in pillars of eternity and satisfactory you have in game notepads. And now days steam notepad is also great. You can even add screemshots to it, but i like my oldschool hand writing stuff more.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply!
Engine limitations I can excuse to a limited degree (it just says to me it wasn’t prioritised correctly) but not for saving any time - at least from the world map, or similar out of engagement situations. If I can save from a church (looking at you, Dragon Quest) I can save from an inn or a bridge or a bush.
I played a game where the cutscenes could only be skipped once loading was done, can’t remember which though - one of the Call of Duty games maybe? That would be a fair compromise.
Drawing maps out by hand is definitely a habit I am pleased not to have to do any more! Back in the days when a game lived in its big box next to my computer it wasn’t a big problem to keep paper in it but nowadays any written notes I made would get lost immediately! If the game designers allow an in game map it should have some basic features like zooming, annotations, and auto-population. I agree that marking every little detail can make a map unusable but it should be my choice as the player what I do with the map, even if that means recording somewhere I found a random horse I want to go back to.
Mostly your comment is making me want to go back to Pillars of Eternity so thank you for that! :)
Coming back to the map markings. It is also economics. How many players are going to use the feature versus how much work it is. It migh seem simple thing, but when you add option for player to write on the map there are lots of things you need to take in to account.
How many symbols can be used, what happens if the games resolution is changed from the settings, how the text wraps if its close to the edge of map, what if there appears new automatic map marker under text user has wroten, are there interactive symbols for fast travelling or something else, will those go under the text or on top, what if writing uses special characters etc etc. Not to mention if devs have been cute with the map and its not just a flat texture. Skyrims map for example is the game world and you can see storms on it. Spending time to make and test all those features when it really serves a tiny fraction of the playerbase is wastefull.
About saving the game. For better or worse its also a game mechanic and now days its not necessary about the limitation. For example if you could save in a middle of an battle in pokemon you could just save the moment you start a fight with shiny pokemon and you could infinetly try to catch it without any stakes. Or if you could save in middle of epic multiphase jrpg boss it would take away from the feeling of succes after long battle.
But i absolutelly agree games should atleast have exit save, so if real live happens and you need to close the game, it should not punish the player and loose their progression.
Combat system that is advertised as skill based but you find out it’s actually damage based and randomized.
Doing really well and winning the impossible mission because you spent time and effort leveling up and honing your skill to defeat a boss or level that you know is going to be difficult. Only for you to fail the mission and get reset or perma death because the plot demanded it.
No controller support on PC
Mobile games with fake game play advertising and demos. In game banner ads or forced ads.
