Absofuckinglutely.

I also hate that gamers in general have been so cooked in mtxs they don't even realize that pay to skip grind is still ptw because you get more options than other players.

Bonus if you also can't access settings and it's stuck in a stupid resolution or something.

Ancient history now but Black&White 1. "Now you know how to rotate the camera to the left. Next let's see if you can rotate it to the right!"

In the game's defence it was still early in the 3D era and there probably was a number of players who had never navigated a free camera in that environment before. Still rage inducing though.

Unless they’re really well integrated. The first 40-60% of Portal is a tutorial. You just don’t notice because it’s just the game.

Truly.

For multiplayer games, I would rather subscribe to updates than have mtxs in any capacity.

Of course they never offer this though because the mtxs combined with dark patterns work better.

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Fuck, this annoys me so much. The new-ish sony games are awful with it (Spider-man and GoW at least), providing beautiful, intricate worlds and levels to explore, but if you aren't sprinting toward the next objective at every moment, it constantly bombards you with little nagging voicelines from npcs or even the main character themselves. I hate it.

Act 1 BG3 was pretty bad about this. I thought the tadpole plot was going to be resolved in Act 1!

First game that came to mind was RD2. I remember a mission at the beginning, where you're meant to clear out some Plinkertons from a house, and I remember one of the camp NPCs asking you to look around for supplies (or maybe something specific).

As soon as you're able to leave the area, Dutch starts screaming at you to hurry tf up. A friend and I will occasionally quote him when we're being jokingly impatient with one another: "C'MON ARTHUR, QUIT HORSIN' AROUN'! WE AIN'T GAHT ALL DAAAY!"

Or to force you to pay attention during what is essentially a cutscene

Dying Light, I'm looking at you...

Mmmhm

And then you stumble into an hour long cinematic.
Fuck that, Kojima should have made movies instead of games.

Don’t play Hades then

It is a fine line, like in Minecraft durability obviously makes sense, so it makes sense that other games try to emulate that. But then look at Stardew Valley, one of the most popular mods is the one that stops fences from degrading because repairing them is tedious.

Breath of the Wild is generally pretty good about letting you explore your own way. For example, the exposition ghost at the start explicitly acknowledges you could go straight to the final boss after leaving the tutorial area if you want, and there are plenty of ways a determined player can reach areas faster than the typical progression routes would take them.

But my goodness the pitiful weapon durability made me want to avoid combat. I distinctly remember coming across a white lionel relatively early and determining I shouldn't bother trying to fight simply because I didn't have enough weapons to get through its health bar.

I built a self-repair skill mod for Fallout New Vegas specifically because I hated that shit.

I love how the one game where this would make sense, FEAR (where the enemy is a clone army controlled by a single psychic commander), is also famous for how well the AI communicates with each other. They shout out detailed tactical chatter and announce their current moves even though it's pointless due to them all sharing the same mind.

And if they have some kind of shared vision because of technology or telepathy, then make it hurt them them when one goes down.

Or make it make sense, like they have to spend a turn to contact the others, or they shout to alert other NPCs, but that just means there know there's a threat in this general area, not "we now have magic GPS for the next five minutes, and then I guess it must have been the wind."

Are there any good examples of AI in games that do the opposite of this? Off the top of my head, pretty much every game works like this, I imagine having every NPC having its own vision & memory would become very complex to manage.

I could understand it if the enemies communicate somehow, like relaying your location

metroidvania boss walk backs are the worst kind of unskippable cutscene. Oh yeah I'd love to kill the same 3 ads and ride an elevator for 30 seconds

When I first started Silksong and noticed my Silk upgrades were gone after death, I first thought they were gone for good. I thought a particular monster had eaten them, sort of like one of the bosses in Demon's Souls, who can steal your character levels (or so I read, I never got to him).

Thank goodness Team Cherry at least held back here! You get them back when you find and smash the cocoon at your point of death.

And +1 for runbacks, also hair-pulling in Silksong. I never thought I'd be able to get through Bilewater.

The Messenger does something similar but in a different way: dying summons a demon that eats any coins that the player collects for the next minute. I already suck, and now the game is punishing me by delaying upgrades.

That's what I like about New Vegas. Get your sneak high enough along with Silent Running and a stealth field, and not even the strongest, most perceptive bosses can notice you. The legendary enemies, the X-42 giant roboscorpion, Lanius, etc all become unable to spot or attack you unless you use a loud weapon, effectively neutralizing them.

I too was about to day Dungeon Keeper for mobile. What a wasted game.

Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature.

Agreed. I can understand in MMOs, but if I'm the only one playing, the game should stop when I say stop.

At least make it an option in the accessibility settings if it's not "the developers' intended experience".

• In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one's precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There's some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don't think that it's necessary

a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don't really like situations where it's just added for the sake of being there.

I hate this mechanic so much. If a player couldn't win with the powerup, all taking it away does is consign them to a slow death spiral. This made sense when shmups were quarter-munching arcade machines, but this "feature" remained a staple of the genre even after it moved to home consoles.

And for a non-shmup example, Super Star Wars was another major offender. The game was incredibly hard even with a maxed out weapon. Dying reverted you to the basic blaster, cutting your damage output to a fraction of what it was and making it nearly impossible to get past the tougher boss fights if you didn't win on the first try. It's often considered one of the hardest games of all time, and I'm willing to bet this mechanic is the main reason why.

Bard's Tale had a street you could not completely walk down. At one point there's a teleporter that just sends you 3 squares back.

Sinister St.

Oh yeah, I really liked Control and recommended someone else play it. He didn't make it far and I asked why not and he said the upgrade system and the crafting... and I was like what crafting?

He said the way you turn figments or whatever into upgrades or whatever. And I was like "oh yeah, that rings a bell... I just didn't do any of that".

I don't always have this power, but in this case I was apparently able to ignore entire chunks of the game and enjoy what was left. So I have a weird skewed view of the game 😛

In Control the only good ones are increasing damage, increasing magazine size, and lowering the cooldowns on your psychic powers. You're basicslly better off just using the throw power than using the service weapon, even on bosses.

Currently feeling something similar with expedition 33.

Buddy, fucking what?

If that counts then in-game rendered intros on first launch running in 720p and you can't change video/display settings until after the game finally gives you control.

God I can't stand it. It's one of those things like "Why do I need that, my eyes can already do that"

I could get into them if they were purely an in-game mechanic, not paid.