Gaming trends that irk you

[BannedInSchool]

Dropping the 'C' from "CRPG".

[Zevox]

I cannot understand the mindset that views DLC as an equal part of the main, original game. Unless the developers are doing something wrong, DLC is/should be an optional extra that you can take or leave at your discretion.

Obviously some do crappy things like withholding something that should and could have been in the base game to sell as DLC (Street Fighter x Tekken's dozen characters that were on the blasted disc, but locked away for sale as "DLC", for instance), but those are a case-by-case basis of developers abusing it, not the norm, in my experience. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by not playing most games' DLC at all, nor do most DLC that I do buy feel like something that was important for the base game to have.

[Aotrs Commander]

Eh, if I can wait long enough for a game to get kickstarted, I can wait a year until they get the final version, especially if I'm not short of anything to play like I was a few years ago (before Pillars of Eternity and the kickstarting thing began). I waited a year for PoE2, after all... A large chunk of the games I've played, excluding Paradox stuff, since what, 2012 have been kickstarted or crowd-funded... And of those that weren't I didn't get them or play them until well after their final expansions came out. (I'll wait for X-Com 3 until the inevitable expansion - as with all three Witcher games, waiting until it was all in place was definitely worth it.)

I'm patient. It takes however long it takes, so long as the job at the end is a good one.

And, of the stuff I did kickstart that's actually made it into a full game, I've been very pleased with.



This is especially true, since if I replay a game at all, it is usually years between. (With a few exceptions.)

[Velaryon]

I'm kind of the opposite. If you've got Day 1 DLC, then it should have been part of the game.

Agreed. When it's super obvious that DLC is nothing more than an unlock key for something that was already on the disc, I feel like I've been double charged for content I already purchased.


Another DLC-related thing I'm not fond of is Season Passes. They can be used just fine - buying a group of DLC packs, usually at a discount. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

What bothers me is when developers start abusing that system, such as by selling expensive season passes with no description or hint of what's even going to be in them. Or when they clearly rush out inferior DLC to meet season pass obligations, and then sell additional DLC that's not covered by the pass that they clearly put much more effort into (looking at you, Borderlands 2!)

[Draconi Redfir]

My personal peeve is click to move, particularly that whole diablo-clone style of click to move with click to use abilities and of course using your abilities locks you in place since they've gotta copy diablo exactly.

same TBH. this was the main killer of "maplestory 2" for me. i wanted to move around with WASD and use my mouse to activate abilities or aim. instead i''d click on the screen to clear a selection or tab back into the game, and my character would go running off in a random direction i didn't want him to go in at all.


this reminds me: two or more vastly different actions being bound to the same key with no way to separate them.

Case in point: Dishonored. Where both "Subdue enemy" and "Block" are bound to the Ctrl key. meaning there were more then a few times where i'd sneak up behind someone to try and subdue them and just end up blocking at their legs. half the time when this happened, the person i was trying to subdue became aware of my presence because i was so close and blocking behind them.

the worst part is that you can't even change this. Re-binding "Block" to say the "T" key ALSO rebinds "Subdue enemy" to the T key, it's impossible to get these two entirely different actions to separate from one another.

[Rodin]

In contrast, I like DLCs that add new content or change the base game somehow, since I already go months between replaying games and adding something fresh into the mix makes it interesting. As an example, the Flashpoint DLC for Battletech added new missions and new maps, so when BT comes back up in my rotation of replays it'll have stuff I've never seen to look forward to.

See, that's a bit different. There are similar DLCs for XCOM2 that expand the game and are meant to effectively replace the original game with an upgraded version made with feedback from the players after release. There isn't a continued story following on from the end of the game, there's nothing hugely plot-relevant that players of XCOM3 will need to know, etc. It's what DLC should be used for, a way to breathe fresh life into a game.

Contrast that with Dragon Age Inquisition, where the DLC outs a major character as a villain. If you go into the next game without having played the DLC, there is going to be a major What the Hell moment for players who didn't do it. In that case, the DLC is very much part of the main game experience, because the story isn't complete without the DLC.

[137beth]

Once IAPs and lootboxes became a thing, I've noticed that publishers and some players have this weird contradictory pair of stances concerning how much I am supposed to care about graphics.

Publisher: Come buy this new game! It has better graphics than the old one!
Player: Well, it looks kind of interesting, but I have concerns. Is this a pay-to-win lootbox-infested game?
Publisher: Don't worry, this game isn't pay to win. It does have lootboxes, but the items you get from them don't really affect the game. They are all cosmetics.

[Anteros]

I cannot understand the mindset that views DLC as an equal part of the main, original game. Unless the developers are doing something wrong, DLC is/should be an optional extra that you can take or leave at your discretion.

Obviously some do crappy things like withholding something that should and could have been in the base game to sell as DLC (Street Fighter x Tekken's dozen characters that were on the blasted disc, but locked away for sale as "DLC", for instance), but those are a case-by-case basis of developers abusing it, not the norm, in my experience. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by not playing most games' DLC at all, nor do most DLC that I do buy feel like something that was important for the base game to have.

Well, that's just it isn't it? We don't usually know if the DLC is going to be something that should have been in the main game or just fun extra content until afterwards.

[Zevox]

Another DLC-related thing I'm not fond of is Season Passes. They can be used just fine - buying a group of DLC packs, usually at a discount. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

What bothers me is when developers start abusing that system, such as by selling expensive season passes with no description or hint of what's even going to be in them.

Now that I agree with. If you're trying to sell me something without even telling me what it is, that is not okay and I will not be buying.

[Resileaf]

Now that I agree with. If you're trying to sell me something without even telling me what it is, that is not okay and I will not be buying.

The worst part is if that season passes can be dropped at any time by the devs if the game didn't sell well enough.

[Velaryon]

The worst part is if that season passes can be dropped at any time by the devs if the game didn't sell well enough.

So they don't even always fulfill their obligations?

The ones I've purchased have been things like "the first X content expansions that are released." Are there times where they do that and only release X-1 or X-2 expansions? Because that sounds like straight-up fraud to me.

[tonberrian]

In contrast, I like DLCs that add new content or change the base game somehow, since I already go months between replaying games and adding something fresh into the mix makes it interesting. As an example, the Flashpoint DLC for Battletech added new missions and new maps, so when BT comes back up in my rotation of replays it'll have stuff I've never seen to look forward to.

I love having dlc post launch, but I do tend to wait for it all to hit before I start playing. I like playing a complete game. Of course, there are series where this is impossible - Paradox's main games, like CK2, EUIV, and Stellaris, I'll play a bunch while waiting for the next DLC.

[warty goblin]

Once IAPs and lootboxes became a thing, I've noticed that publishers and some players have this weird contradictory pair of stances concerning how much I am supposed to care about graphics.

Publisher: Come buy this new game! It has better graphics than the old one!
Player: Well, it looks kind of interesting, but I have concerns. Is this a pay-to-win lootbox-infested game?
Publisher: Don't worry, this game isn't pay to win. It does have lootboxes, but the items you get from them don't really affect the game. They are all cosmetics.

Generally better graphics are used to enhance the immersion or art design of the world. More cosmetic customization options allow you to dress up as pink polka-dot nurse or whatever. In most games, this goes directly against the grain of better immersion or artistic consistency, because this is generally aimed at MP, and nobody in MP cares about that stuff.

The ones that puzzle me are cosmetic customization for first person games. Just try to choose a number small enough to express how little I care about the color of my murder-toon's forearms. It's sufficiently nonzero that I will occasionally faff about with it momentarily, if only to make multiple class builds distinguishable from each other, but it's smaller than any amount expressable in US dollars and cents. It makes zero gameplay impact, and I cannot fathom actually caring at all about somebody else's paintjob, so why would anybody give a crap about mine?

[Anteros]

Generally better graphics are used to enhance the immersion or art design of the world. More cosmetic customization options allow you to dress up as pink polka-dot nurse or whatever. In most games, this goes directly against the grain of better immersion or artistic consistency, because this is generally aimed at MP, and nobody in MP cares about that stuff.

The ones that puzzle me are cosmetic customization for first person games. Just try to choose a number small enough to express how little I care about the color of my murder-toon's forearms. It's sufficiently nonzero that I will occasionally faff about with it momentarily, if only to make multiple class builds distinguishable from each other, but it's smaller than any amount expressable in US dollars and cents. It makes zero gameplay impact, and I cannot fathom actually caring at all about somebody else's paintjob, so why would anybody give a crap about mine?

I do enjoy making my character look cool, and I'll devote game time to unlocking things to that end. Not money though, and not in a fps where you never even see your character.

[Winthur]

RPGs that work off some assumption that they're a heightened intellectual genre for the literate and are therefore jampacked with a ton of writing of varying quality to the point of throwing pacing off. Made me appreciate lore-light dungeon crawlers.

Weirdly looking male models that make me reluctant to roll a male character in spite of it fitting the concept simply because women have better animations or look better with armor.

[Sermil]

Naming your own Main Character, especially in RPGs.

10 years ago, it was cool. You chose a name, and the text when people talked to you was "[Name], we need to hurry!" For me, I wanted my character to fit into Japan, so my MC was "Shiro" and fit right in with the other Japanese high school students without breaking immersion. While someone else could name their character "A**hole Bob" because they thought it was funny having the teachers looking so serious while saying "A**hole Bob".

Maybe in 10 years, it will be cool again, when speech synthesis is so good all the other character's speech can be generated on the fly.

But right now? Stop it, developers. All the pre-recorded lines where your best friend just says "him" but the subtitle text has your name are just awful and really obvious. And why are you letting me name the character and then force him to have a "code name" which everyone uses to refer to him for half the game anyways to get around the fact that you can't record dialogue with the given name? (And if I can choose my PCs real name, why can't I choose his code name?)

Even the "Commander Shepard" hack isn't perfect -- there are definitely some, um, intimate moments where certain NPCs should have been calling her "Jane" not "Shepard", and it was a little weird.

[houlio]

I don't really heavy specific complaints that haven't already been brought up (lootboxes, live-service), but one general thing that increasingly gets to me is that it feels like game design has become increasingly conservative in the last few years. There's a lot of low-end indie games that push boundaries, but those tend towards being extremely limited in scope or ambition due to resource constraints. High-end big games seem to really be much more focused on being the safest way to turn a profit around instead of on what new and/or interesting things we can possibly do.

[Keltest]

I don't really heavy specific complaints that haven't already been brought up (lootboxes, live-service), but one general thing that increasingly gets to me is that it feels like game design has become increasingly conservative in the last few years. There's a lot of low-end indie games that push boundaries, but those tend towards being extremely limited in scope or ambition due to resource constraints. High-end big games seem to really be much more focused on being the safest way to turn a profit around instead of on what new and/or interesting things we can possibly do.

A non-trivial part of this is because of the increasing cost of game development making it harder to soak up a loss if your game doesn't do well. If you aren't backed by a major company of some kind that owns a quarter of the planet's money, then every game you make is a major investment of capital, and your ability to continue to do so basically relies on that game bringing in money. If you are backed by such a company, then they and their shareholders basically require you to turn a profit.

To that end, I will be quite glad when this "gaming as a service" nonsense finally has the life strangled out of it. Trying to nickel and dime me for every tiny little thing the game needs to function at all is the easiest way to get me to not buy the game in the first place.

[Triaxx]

Losing games as a service might kill Triple-A gaming, depending on how attached they are to the constant profit. Not that I object personally to losing a few 'new year, same game, slight change' series.

Improving graphics, and making worlds look much better, and then making the game such a fast-paced, edge of the seat twitch action game, that it could take place in the standard featureless brown box corridors for all that you get to pay attention to anything but holding the trigger. Pacing seems to be a completely lost art.

[Keltest]

Losing games as a service might kill Triple-A gaming, depending on how attached they are to the constant profit. Not that I object personally to losing a few 'new year, same game, slight change' series.

Improving graphics, and making worlds look much better, and then making the game such a fast-paced, edge of the seat twitch action game, that it could take place in the standard featureless brown box corridors for all that you get to pay attention to anything but holding the trigger. Pacing seems to be a completely lost art.

If Triple-A gaming cant survive as a concept without overtly trying to squeeze every last penny out of the players, I would rather just take the idea out back and put it out of its misery now. The industry and players can only benefit from that in the long run.

[Psyren]

The over focus on perfect balance. Arena gameplay is as far from fun as I can have in a video game; I put 1,200 hours into TF2 and about five into Overwatch. The movement from RTS to MOBAs is also irritating but happened long enough ago I am basically just an old man yelling on a porch now.

RTS are still coming out - we tried Spellforce 3 Soul Harvest over the weekend and it is pretty dang cool. Fully voiced, beautiful visuals, strong RPG elements (Dialogue choices! Talent trees!) along with the good stuff from the genre like multiple factions and managing resources/supply against army comp and size.

Agreed 100%. Mega Man X is an old game, but it still looks good because it had STYLE. And beyond that, it's just FUN.

Yep, and there's a specific term for this concept:

RPGs and action/adventure games going "open-world" and treating linearity like a bad thing. I really dislike the dynamic it creates of developers populating oversized worlds with shallow filler that just isn't nearly as fun a few well-thought-out side-quests in a more linear game would be. And it would be one thing if it were confined to series like The Elder Scrolls or Assassin's Creed, which have long been defined by that design MO, or developers that specialize in it like Bethesda, but a lot of series have moved towards that when they weren't before. Bioware did so with both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, leading me to lose interest in them when they were previously one of my favorite developers; The Legend of Zelda went that way with Breath of the Wild, which made it the only main-series Zelda game I haven't played (besides the first two, which I've just never gone back to try); and the Witcher switched to it with 3, leading to me deciding that just having played 2 was enough of that for me after all. "Massive open world to explore!" popping up in a trailer is legitimately one of the fastest ways to lose my interest in a game outside of it being from a genre I just always dislike.

I get your point, but I think Zelda is a bad example though - it's a series that always wanted to be open-world, it's just that the tech wasn't quite there (particularly on Nintendo systems which have usually lagged hardware-wise.) With the Switch, they've finally caught up to truly enable that. The core design of LoZ from the very beginning has been a world that unfolds organically as the player gets new capabilities, and the player having some level of agency in how/when they acquire those capabilities. BotW's genius was in giving you more reason to want to do that kind of exploration than the previous installments did (in particular, the "recover your memories using this photo album" mechanic.)

[Erloas]

I don't really heavy specific complaints that haven't already been brought up (lootboxes, live-service), but one general thing that increasingly gets to me is that it feels like game design has become increasingly conservative in the last few years. There's a lot of low-end indie games that push boundaries, but those tend towards being extremely limited in scope or ambition due to resource constraints. High-end big games seem to really be much more focused on being the safest way to turn a profit around instead of on what new and/or interesting things we can possibly do.

I'm guessing you're not that old, because that isn't a trend, that has been the case for at least 25 years. In fact for much of that time indie games didn't even exist, though I think shareware games would loosely fall into the indie category now, but going viral wasn't as easy as it is now so they had less wide-spread appeal.

Add on top of that, much of what is considered "safe design" now didn't exist not too long ago and what used to be considered safe is no longer that. Battle royale for instance is considered "safe" now but didn't even exist a few years ago. MMOs used to be considered "safe" and now you hardly see any. You're seeing as much, and as little, innovation now as you've ever seen, the difference is that right now you see everything being released and looking back 20 years you only note or remember the games that were noteworthy, the ones that stood out. Even that isn't perfect, because many people attribute many things to, for instance, WoW that WoW didn't do first, it was just many player's first encounter with whatever X was. Fallout and Baldur's Gate are often considered the pinnacle of late 90s/early 2000s RPGs but they didn't do anything wholly unique or innovative, they just did what they did well.

Even the evolution of shooters to what they are today was built on many different games trying different things, to the point where many RPGs and shooters have so much in common that there is no one thing that can be pointed to that differentiates them.

Now, more than ever, it seems like games need a gimmick to make them stand apart and get any attention. Being "safe" doesn't help or sell games if someone can get the same experience from playing a dozen games they already own.

[Lord Raziere]

yeah I pretty much don't buy any game that requires a subscription or microtransactions attached to it, and the game left I still play that has anything of that sort attached to it is hearthstone. I still pay for DLC, because those are one time, but anything ongoing is something untrustworthy, not unplayable, but something to at the very least be careful about investing in, so unless I'm getting a real quality experience I don't invest into it. (its exactly the reason I don't buy FF 14, despite all the good things I heard about it- It has a subscription, so I'd only be able play it free for a month to see what its about then leave)

the games I purchase these days are often indie or more limited in scope because not only I spend less, I get quality I don't get from triple A's while being challenged in ways triple A's don't. like Crossworlds not only had a good story, but actually challenged me in combat and figure out the most devious and long of puzzles, thats quality right there.

[Zevox]

I get your point, but I think Zelda is a bad example though - it's a series that always wanted to be open-world, it's just that the tech wasn't quite there (particularly on Nintendo systems which have usually lagged hardware-wise.) With the Switch, they've finally caught up to truly enable that. The core design of LoZ from the very beginning has been a world that unfolds organically as the player gets new capabilities, and the player having some level of agency in how/when they acquire those capabilities. BotW's genius was in giving you more reason to want to do that kind of exploration than the previous installments did (in particular, the "recover your memories using this photo album" mechanic.)

I won't speak to what the developers have "always wanted," as I don't know their minds on the matter. But completely regardless of that, it is an excellent example of what I was talking about, because it's a series that I used to love which now I can't expect to ever be interested in again. Twenty years ago I would have called Ocarina of Time my favorite game ever, and to this day I still very much like it as well as most of the other 3D Zelda titles. But watching footage of people playing parts of Breath of the Wild on Youtube it did not take long for me to see a lot of things that make me go "oh hell, no." But it was more than successful enough that I have no reason to expect them to ever do anything but that style of gameplay again - and as a result, for instance, the teaser for the next game that came at the end of Nintendo's E3 direct did nothing at all for me. Because I can't expect it to be something I'll like anymore.

[Bohandas]

I'm sick of

*Games that take up huge amounts of drive space but don't have a correspondingly huge amount of content; they just have a lot of graphics junk that my computer can't use anyway

*Realtime strategy and RPGs

*First-person shooters that try so hard to tell a story that they forget to include a first-person shooter (anything that emulates the Half-Life series)

*RPGs requiring excessive amounts of inventory management that take up more time than the actual game (especially if it doesn't even add versimilitude, as in games like Dungeons of Dredmor where you are limited by the number of *different* things you can carry, and carrying one of every different type of specialized arrow is less doable than carrying one of every type of armor, because they both take up one slot and there's more types of arrows)

This is less a thing regarding games themselves and more on the sidelines, but of late I've become increasingly frustrated that as new games come out, fewer and fewer of them have guides. I can find dozens of well-written, detailed guides for older games like Planescape: Torment or even Dragon Age: Origins and The Witcher series on sites like GameFAQs and GameBanshee, even if there aren't strategy guide books anymore these days, but for more current games you're left to scrounge through wikis full of half-written articles and broken links or beg people for help on forums, and in the rare event that there ARE official books anymore, they'll only cover the base game and not have any information on the DLC expansions that come out later. Some of these games have been out for at least a year, and yet I can't find any more information on how to get the best endings and stuff than I could when they launched (I'm looking at YOU, Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pillars of Eternity! )!

And when there are guides they're increasingly in unsearchable and inconvenient formats, like videos.

[Eldonauran]

For myself, I have to agree the loot box thing is one of the highest pet peeves of mine. And this includes each and EVERY game that uses a random (or random-like) system to determine access to 'heroes' or 'monsters' or 'cards' to build a 'party'. It might be an irrational thing, but I absolutely despise those kinds of systems. I don't play games to 'gamble' like that. I make calculated risks, with some kind of ability to influence the outcome outside of spending more (real) resources in order to get a chance at a better result.

I have no desire to help fund these games that prey on the addictive nature of gambling to acquire income.

[Gnoman]

I won't speak to what the developers have "always wanted," as I don't know their minds on the matter. But completely regardless of that, it is an excellent example of what I was talking about, because it's a series that I used to love which now I can't expect to ever be interested in again. Twenty years ago I would have called Ocarina of Time my favorite game ever, and to this day I still very much like it as well as most of the other 3D Zelda titles. But watching footage of people playing parts of Breath of the Wild on Youtube it did not take long for me to see a lot of things that make me go "oh hell, no." But it was more than successful enough that I have no reason to expect them to ever do anything but that style of gameplay again - and as a result, for instance, the teaser for the next game that came at the end of Nintendo's E3 direct did nothing at all for me. Because I can't expect it to be something I'll like anymore.

Let me ask you a simple question.


Have you ever played the original Legend Of Zelda? The only thing that BotW does that wasn't first done there (other than the massive amounts of expository text and cutscenes, which the NES couldn't handle) was breakable weapons (which BOTW has because the developers didn't want you to find most treasures useless).

[Rynjin]

I'm sick of

*Games that take up huge amounts of drive space but don't have a correspondingly huge amount of content; they just have a lot of graphics junk that my computer can't use anyway

Probably not.

It's likely even worse. Most games that seem unusually large come bundled with several types of bloated, bulky programs that really have nothing to do with the game. Ubisoft is particularly bad with this, as you download like three different kinds of DRM and a new copy of their launcher every time you install one of their games.

*First-person shooters that try so hard to tell a story that they forget to include a first-person shooter (anything that emulates the Half-Life series)

This segment doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Most FPS games have the opposite issue, and it's what has plagued the genre for years (story heavy shooters tend to be third person). But more than that, it implies the Half-Life games are emblematic of this issue, when the series were highly influential and polished FPS games for their time that defined the genre for years afterward, as well as being praised for their story (which is told almost entirely through environmental storytelling anyway).

Weird sentence, that.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

And when there are guides they're increasingly in unsearchable and inconvenient formats, like videos.

GAH! I KNOW! I'm the kind of player that needs to have the guide open on my desk while I'm playing, and it's frustrating enough to have the guides on my phone and needing to peer at the tiny text on it rather than normal-sized text in a book, but needing to open YOUTUBE to get this information, especially when the games I play are so text-heavy, which is hard to read on YouTube alone, let alone on a phone screen?! I can't even PRINT them like I used to less than a decade ago!

[Man_Over_Game]

I vehemently dislike the recent trend of zero-gameplay story games.

Some people like them. To me, they're interactive picture books, and it's a lot less misleading if they were labeled as such.