My particularly niche gripe is bad dialogue tree options. There are so many games where the mechanism is selecting an option and watching it play out, but so many of them are shit when it comes to the difference between what you see as the option and what actually is said/done. Heavy Rain did it. ‘What should the character say next? Unreadable zalgotext option A, or unreadable zalgotext option B?’ Or ones where the options on screen are ‘A) I thoroughly agree. B) I thoroughly disagree. or C) What?’ but selecting C means the character isn’t just asking for clarification because ‘What?’ actually points at the voiceline, ‘What the fuck are you talking about, you piece of inhuman filth? I bet your a murdering rapist.’ If I can’t have some idea of what selecting an option will do, I’m not actually playing a game at that point. I might as well be trying to play Mario with a controller that remaps itself randomly.

Not being able to jump in a first person game.

Cutscenes that can’t be paused, especially if they’re longer than 10 seconds.

Do you have the slightest idea how frustrating it is to be mid-cutscene, something else requires my attention, and I cannot fucking pause it? Singlehandedly my biggest gripe with gaming.

Anything that needlessly makes me repeat content I already beat or similarly wastes my time. Some examples are:

Fixed save points in general.

Unskippable cutscenes between the last fixed save point and the boss fight.

No autosave or fixed save point after a boss fight.

Preventing me from backtracking after I stumbled into a cut scene and/or boss fight because it wasn’t obvious which path led to a point of no return.

Oh, and no Play Station style controller glyphs. Come on, it’s an additional set of images, now hard can it be to implement?

Photo modes that limit camera movement to within a tiny radius of the player character. FF7 Remake/Rebirth, and FF16, are glaring examples of this.

Or photo modes that fade out NPCs or objects when the camera gets close enough for good screenshots of them.

Just give me a boundless flying camera option and let me live with the unfinished bits if I so choose.

Games you can’t pause. I love Dark Souls, but PLEASE give me a real pause button !

I’m okay with the inventory not pausing, that’s part of the game design. I’m not okay with the fact I can’t pause at all, so if my neighbour rings for their spare key when I’m fighting Kalameet I just have to die 🤷🏻‍♀ (true story btw)

Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.

Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it’s 30% more gold and that’s the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.

A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.

Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.

It’s different if there’s stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it’s just jogging? Very disappointing.

Obligatory tutorials. Make it a choice.

QTE “final bosses”. Seemed to be a much bigger problem in the PS3/360 era.

“Open world” or “Sandbox” games that don’t care about your progress, where it’s painfully obvious that your actions don’t matter at all. Yes, this is mostly about Starfield

Games where you can win by a landslide but the computer/story goes “Hah, you were just lucky!”

Definitely with you on controller rebinding! Now that I’m an old man I also absolutely hate how damn tiny the text is when playing games on a TV. Gamers are getting old, we don’t all have young eyes or sit in front of a monitor to play games!

3D level design where you can get stuck on elements when you just want to move past them. Especially frustrating in racing games or sections where you have to move fast. Controls are just not precise enough to deal with this under stress.

Visible polygons and interactable polygons are not the same thing. Play Banjo Kazooie and Yookah Laylee (including the remake) to see the difference. The latter has you constantly bump into things because the environment is not smoothed out.

On the other hand some studios take it to the other extreme and make you walk almost on rails, childproofing every corner. A good middle ground is needed.

I have two.

1. The Culture

I do not claim to be a ‘gamer’. I prefer to be best described as someone who plays games, but not nearly as often as one branded a ‘gamer’ would play games by. But I’ve been partly turned off from video games because of the culture surrounding them. The streamers who play games, the RGB droolers, the tech-junkies, the whales, the hype-train types, the multi-hour essay level of delivering an opinion on a game .etc

Not to mention, all of the gamer-branded merchandise from chairs to even drinks. It just turns me off and I do not ever associate with that crowd and it’s a damn shame there is so much gullibility with the culture that it is difficult to avoid.

2. Game-Padding

Side-quest after side-quest does a game not make. That kind of thing is what you’d find in an MMO that needs to find things for you to do. Not in a more constrained container of a game that has a fixed story, a fixed completion rate and everything. All it tells me is that the developers did not think of or have had any faith in what they were making.

Games that don’t allow you to pause and skip cutscenes.

I don’t want to have to miss half of the cutscenes just because someone interrupted me or the phone rang or something half way through. Alternatively, when I’m on my 23rd replay of a game, I do not want to have to sit through every cutscenes I already know by heart.

Oh, and modern games that allow manual saving at any time, not having any kind of regular auto save (looking at you here BG3).

If you’re fine from a gameplay pov with having the player save whenever, then there’s really no good reason whatsoever to not have one or two auto save slots that get saved every 10-20 minutes or so, at least as an option in the menu. ESPECIALLY in open world games (like BG3…) where you can easily go literal hours at a time without hitting a checkpoint save. And yes, I am still salty over learning about BG3’s lack of regular auto save when I lost like 2.5 hours of progress on my first run.

When the music doesn’t stop on the Pause screen.

Needing to log into an online account to play a single-player game.

When a single-player game keeps pausing to tell me it can’t connect to the server.

unpausable cutscenes. Nothing bugs me more than getting interrupted in the middle of a cutscene and not being able to press escape to pause the cutscene. You’re forced to try to split your attention between what interrupted you and the cutscene or restart and see the cutscene from the beginning again.

Extra annoyance points if escape immediately skips the cutscene without any indication it’s going to.