Title is tongue in cheek, of course—they probably are gamers. I get that making a game is complex and full of trade-offs, and you can’t please everyone. Still, there are certain design decisions that just feel like they weren’t made by people who play games regularly.
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Top-down/twin-stick games where the aim (especially on controller) uses camera handling features, like smoothing the input or a cross-shaped deadzone.
Screenshake enabled by default, or not even an option to disable.
Can you bring up the pause menu at any point (including cut scenes).
I’ve always felt like a sign of a well polished game was one where the pause menu would work at any point, including during cutscenes.
The worst is when the start button instantly skips the cutscene with no confirmation/warning
Are there actually games that allow this?
I seem to remember even FF7 allowing this.
Bayonetta games do. Opens a specific pause menu with skipping option.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon does this and I’m grateful.
When there are several waterfalls in the game and not one has a secret behind it.
Quick Time Events; characters that automatically do 60 things just by holding down “forward” on the joystick; the Ubisoft logo.
Putting a QTE or a limited time choice in a long cutscene or a level segment.
When you can’t tap a button to fill the text dialogue, and have to wait for each letter to individually populate for 15 speech bubbles in a row.
or even worse when you have to wait for the voiced dialogue to finish before it lets you continue.
I’ve been replaying Dragon Quest Builders 2. The game isn’t voiced, most of dialogues are classic RPG text boxes that you can speed up and skip, BUT. There are special lines of dialogue that are “voices” in a character’s head.
They are unskippable, and they’re like a dozen words each that stay on screen for about 20 seconds or more. Some of those dialogues have about 6-7 of those. It’s unbearable, and it’s genuinely the worst part of starting a game again. Hell, it was the worst part of doing it the first time, too.
Somehow English localisation created this, in Japanese the messages go a lot faster. Though even those couldn’t be skipped, because… fuck you that’s why.
I like that BG3 let’s you skip the voice dialogue but I wish there was an option to speed up the voice acting because I really love the voice acting and the story is great but I find myself spacing out during long cutscenes. I don’t want to skip them I just want them to speak quickly!
I just played through Pentiment and even on the fastest speed dialogues were painfully slow. It wouldn’t fix all the other pacing issues, but the text popping up instantly would be a huge improvement.
Unskippable cutscenes. While I do love Soul Reaver’s storytelling, sometimes I just want to skip the damn thing and get on with the adventure.
Walking simulators. The devs just wanted to tell a story, not make a game.
If we’re complaining about bad UX, and speaking about Soul Reaver, games with no subtitle option. Or bad, unreadable subtitles that spoil 2 minutes of dialogue at once (and that one’s for you, Bioshock).
I play walking simulators and other games, I can’t agree with that one.
Singleplayer games with time-based farming simulator minigames you won’t complete without gaming the date\time in your system (easter eggs are welcome tho). Grindy platinum achievements well outside even a dedicated minority’s norms, just getting bigger numbers or save skamming for opposing endings. Button-mashers with an undisclosed randomization of a final result under the hood.
Long cutscenes that don’t let you save or pause when anything comes up that forces you to leave the keyboard or just focus elsewhere.
“Control” was the worst wrt this (or was it Quantum Break? Maybe both). I was just about to go to bed when it showed me a “cutscene” that went on for more than 30 minutes. Turned out later that you could actually go back to watch it again afterwards, but there was no indication of that at the time.
That would have been Quantum Break. I don’t recall Control having any one cutscene that long.
But Quantum Break did the whole video-game/TV-series hybrid media thing, and was full of “episodes” that were essentially 30-minute cutscenes.
The Steam Deck is great in that regard. Just put it to sleep.
Same with the Switch and easily one of the top features. Laundry done? Sleep mode. SO asks something? Sleep mode. Done pooing? Sleep mode.
I’m playing through Control now and haven’t encountered that (fun game btw!), so methinks it’s Quantum Break you’re thinking of.
I agree with you, though. Sometimes I have to step away for whatever reason and end up missing something because I can’t pause.
When the intro cannot be skipped after the first start.
In the same vein, when the game starts immediately without giving you a chance to configure it. Because the default configuration is always wrong.
I sure love experiencing their carefully crafted intro sequence in 4fps/windowed 480p/etc.
cry in 12 years old pc
Falcom spoiled me forever by offering a startup option to continue from last save that skips all the logos, intros, etc.
When the game is such a precious labour of love, so obviously cared for, and constantly improved, that there’s no way the dev has any time left for gaming.
When maxing out the damage stat just makes your game trivially easy.
Stat systems are hard and prone to optimization problems. But c’mon, you at least gotta test the glass cannon build that you know everyone’s gonna try first.
When going from point a to point b takes ages or is otherwise a pain. I get you worked hard on your world, but it losses its charm the 10th time running across it.
And don’t force me to hold/tap a button to sprint. Or worse, make me click in the left stick.
It’s not the time or distance, its the barren wasteland of no content in between A and B. I’ll hold W down for 30 minutes no problem as long as it’s interesting.
When things aren’t balanced. It either tells me the devs do not play their game or they have a dominant strategy and don’t bother playing anything else.
I’ve heard stories from professionals and you would be surprised how many devs don’t actually play the game they are developing.
In almost every game the gameplay tips and tutorials they give you are not only suboptimal but often outright counterproductive. This is especially bad in multiplayer games.
It was really nice in Doom Eternal, where they added quick swapping to the tips.
I’ll go first: when mouse sensitivity is unbalanced by default—horizontal movement is way faster than vertical—and the game only allows you to change the overall sensitivity for both axes together.
E-mail the developers that you know they’re using ultrawides and will literally never figure out how. And that’s part of the problem.
I sing think I’ve ever seen that but in the same vein, when the game idea a terrible laggy software mouse in menus with the sensitivity tied to the look sensitivity in game
Pc version of open world exploration game without quicksave key. There’s a lot of wrong with Grounded, but man i feels like Obsidian really losing touch with PC game with this one.
Conversely, Grounded has the best inventory management system of any survival game ever.
To the point that I have a hard time playing others now because they all feel tedious in comparison. It’s hard to imagine someone playing Grounded and then building a survival game that didn’t use hot deposit.
JUST for hot deposit, yeh. the rest of the inventory/hotbar management always makes me wish i was playing something else.
the hotbar not being inventory space is fine, but tools disappearing because they’re in your hand is absurd. they really just added a “looking for the tv remote that i’m already holding” mechanic. the pinning system with filters is handy for food, but feels clunky outside that one usecase.
like they went with a realistic “the forest” style building system, and then the inventory management is the most videogamey shit in the world.
also the scroll wheel swapping hotbars by default is straight up whacky, i’ve heard the whole thing makes more sense on controller lmao
That’s true, a key for depositing item and also control whether the chest is affected or not is really handy for inventory management. Which really bother me that they don’t have quicksave, graphic setting customisation, turning off the character chatter, among other thing.
meanwhile i wish there was a slider that made the characters MORE chatty, the dynamic interactions are really charming to me! but i also specifically love how cliché they’re written, so can see how it’s not for everybody haha
