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[SOLDIER First]

Games that should have (certain) vehicles that don't/games with sucky vehicle sections.
Such as GTA 4 not having planes.

[Neonivek]

Games that should have (certain) vehicles that don't/games with sucky vehicle sections.
Such as GTA 4 not having planes.

Is a game with terrible vehicles really a pet peeve? It is like listing sucky gameplay as a pet peeve.

[SOLDIER First]

Eh, you're right.

[Fniff]

I think it counts. We are listing out pet peeves, and having problems with gameplay is part of it.

[GreatJustice]

Pseudo-Nihilistic Villains

I can't even begin to count the number of games that, instead of making a somewhat nuanced villain with reasonable motivations, make the villain simply want to destroy the world because "Mwahahaha!". Alternatively, they have some lame ass excuse along the lines of "Well suffering is bad and if you're dead you aren't suffering therefore killing everyone is good", which is still pretty damn stupid. This seems to come up more in Japanese games than Western games, and in JRPGs more than other genres, though some series' have a lot of this (I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy!)

Stupidly Huge Healthbars

Some game designers realize that their game needs to ramp up the difficulty. Now, they could do this by increasing enemy variety, changing loadouts, giving the enemies better defensive positions, putting the player in a trickier situation, etc. Instead, what many instead opt to do is simply reuse the same enemies but make their healthbars bigger. This doesn't actually make the game harder, it just makes it long and boring as you spend half a minute completely destroying one guy, knowing that you'll have to repeat this over and over without any real satisfaction.

Ornamental AI Allies

If I have allies with me in a fight, I damn well want them to do something! It's really stupid if you have a small army on your side, but they can't hit anything/don't help in the slightest, meaning I still have to kill all of the enemies on my own. On the other hand, this can be inverted to negative effect:

Overpowered AI Allies

Sometimes, the game opts to make your friendlies so damn powerful that they can win the battle while you cower behind a wall waiting for it to all be over. I don't necessarily disapprove of this in certain situations (see: once you reach the "tipping point" in Space Rangers), but winning a game should involve more effort than taking cover and waiting for it to all be over. Special mention goes to Haze, where you initially have drugged up guys in super armour on your side that are basically invincible, but when you switch sides you discover that the khaki wearing guerrillas have somehow made their skin bulletproof and invented armour piercing rounds.

[Flying Dice]

Stupidly Huge Healthbars

Some game designers realize that their game needs to ramp up the difficulty. Now, they could do this by increasing enemy variety, changing loadouts, giving the enemies better defensive positions, putting the player in a trickier situation, etc. Instead, what many instead opt to do is simply reuse the same enemies but make their healthbars bigger. This doesn't actually make the game harder, it just makes it long and boring as you spend half a minute completely destroying one guy, knowing that you'll have to repeat this over and over without any real satisfaction.

This. This. It's lazy, boring, and completely uninspired. Bethesda is one of the most notable offenders in my book. Incidentally, it's one of the things that Stardock did beautifully with GalCiv2, where increasing the difficulty doesn't just let the AI cheat with numbers but instead unshackles the AI a bit more, making it play with greater foresight and "intelligence". Let's not limit it to HP, either. Any difficulty increase that can be summarized as "This stat value increases/decreases from n to n*difficultymodifier" is lazy design. Granted, it's also easy, and in some cases might be the only practical way of changing the difficulty, but that doesn't mean that it should be the automatic standard for every game out there.

[Glloyd]

Pseudo-Nihilistic Villains

I can't even begin to count the number of games that, instead of making a somewhat nuanced villain with reasonable motivations, make the villain simply want to destroy the world because "Mwahahaha!". Alternatively, they have some lame ass excuse along the lines of "Well suffering is bad and if you're dead you aren't suffering therefore killing everyone is good", which is still pretty damn stupid. This seems to come up more in Japanese games than Western games, and in JRPGs more than other genres, though some series' have a lot of this (I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy!)

The entire Tales series anyone?

Stupidly Huge Healthbars

Some game designers realize that their game needs to ramp up the difficulty. Now, they could do this by increasing enemy variety, changing loadouts, giving the enemies better defensive positions, putting the player in a trickier situation, etc. Instead, what many instead opt to do is simply reuse the same enemies but make their healthbars bigger. This doesn't actually make the game harder, it just makes it long and boring as you spend half a minute completely destroying one guy, knowing that you'll have to repeat this over and over without any real satisfaction.

This is all that Borderlands 1 and 2 are. Hell, it's arguable that the first one didn't have a story at all, and was merely an animated sequence of enemy health and gun damage increasing in a linear fashion.

Ornamental AI Allies

If I have allies with me in a fight, I damn well want them to do something! It's really stupid if you have a small army on your side, but they can't hit anything/don't help in the slightest, meaning I still have to kill all of the enemies on my own. On the other hand, this can be inverted to negative effect:

Too many FPS's do this. I HATE feeling like the hero. I dunno, that's just me, but 90% of the time, I just want to be another expendable person. So it annoys me to high hell when your AI allies don't seem to do anything to the enemy at all. Or, as is common in older FPS's, the enemy ignores your allies altogether and just fires at you. Yes, the developers want you to feel like you're in the middle of it all, but that's just poor coding, and annoys me to no end.

[hector13]

Plot twists that don't quite make sense

Specifically, Dishonored. If you go the bad route and kill everyone, then before the final mission Corvo

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

gets poisoned by the dudes you're helping, Samuel the boatsman saves you. Then essentially tells you you're the worst person of ever and tries to get you killed by alerting the guards to your presence at the start of the final mission.

If he was going to do that, why rescue you in the first place?

[alexandertnt]

You are the de jure hero

Your character has been chosen by fate/gods/magic/something-beyond-anyones-control to save the world. Or your character just happens to have special blood/history/excuse that gives them abailities no one else has. I dont like being the de jure hero, and would rather save the world in the same way anyone else could.

Maby so many games have built my role up to be the guy born of royal blood, with unique magical properties granted by *insert diety here*, chosen by fate to save the universe (i.e. repeating "your special", "your special", "your special", "your special") that I am just tired of it and it no longer strikes me as particularly interesting.

[Glloyd]

You are the de jure hero

Your character has been chosen by fate/gods/magic/something-beyond-anyones-control to save the world. Or your character just happens to have special blood/history/excuse that gives them abailities no one else has. I dont like being the de jure hero, and would rather save the world in the same way anyone else could.

Maby so many games have built my role up to be the guy born of royal blood, with unique magical properties granted by *insert diety here*, chosen by fate to save the universe (i.e. repeating "your special", "your special", "your special", "your special") that I am just tired of it and it no longer strikes me as particularly interesting.

I HATE feeling like the hero. I dunno, maybe that's just me, but 90% of the time, I just want to be another expendable person.

I feel your pain. All of it.

[itisnotlogical]

Portraying a warzone as a set of isolated firefights in a walled-off piece of city with some heavily-scripted set pieces

Happens all the time in FPS games. Half-Life 2 finally got it right in that new NPC combatants constantly enter the fray from all sides with no specific scripting. The Striders especially went a long way towards the atmosphere, constantly destroying terrain and forcing me to dodge around all the time, scrounging for ammo to deal with them.

[Neonivek]

Ok how about

Forced Team Mates who make no sense why we would ever have them with us because they are backstabbing psychopaths that no one would ever trust!

DANG IT BIOWARE! You keep doing it! Why do you keep forcing me to keep your psychopath character? Yes I know you tend to make them likable and less psychopathic if you get to know them, but that is like taking home a circus bear with foam around its mouth and then you later find out it was only toothpaste.

Forced Romance

"Ohh my, I knew you for almost a second! Lets have sex on your cold rotting body!... Wait what do you mean that isn't romantic?" Said Quantic Dream.

There is one thing Quantic Dream does very well, established relationships feel very strong and organic... You can feel the relationship and experiences through the characters even though you never been on their personal journey. Yet relationships meant to build over time are always the worst parts of those games because they never give it proper time to develop.

Quantic Dream isn't the only ones who do this, Hey Dragon Age, but they have the distinction of both doing it the worst and also hinging their stories on it. Whenever Mass Effect or Dragon Age did it, it was so clumsy that it was meant to illicit a comedic reaction. Yet Quantic Dream intends to be taken seriously and manages to make the most unsexy, filthy, and outright terrible love scenes EVER! Probably because someone working on the team was a necrophiliac (and I am not even joking).

Yet to bring back Dragon Age what made it so forced was because you never feel like you really connect to a lot of the characters, your relationship feels very superficial and thus the romance feels very superficial which only served to draw you out of the game (then again Bioware can only do a few characters right), yet it was meant to be a superficial relationship. Yet even then it was pretty bad.

But that is because SHOCK AND BEHOLD!!! Bioware isn't trying to actually handle relationships in the game... They are actually holding back the character's life story and is making you unlock it through tedium.

Stupid Evil in serious games

Hello person I am meant to take seriously. What should we do about this Villages bug problem? Burn it down? That makes absolutely no sense and I hate you. Why do I let you in the party?

I blame Fable for this in particular. Fable was interesting in that it was a game where you could try to be good or evil but otherwise the story was the game making it a cosmetic choice. Yet other games that include a morality system include NPCs who are meant to reflect the different moral aspects.

Come in the Stupid evil characters who have a COMPLETE LACK of self-preservation or insight or foresight or anything resembling a human thinking process so long as they get to be viciously evil. There are a few categories
1) Doing good things for others is dumb stupid (Morigan): Thanks for that input while I polish my several trophies and treasures I got for my good deeds often without taking any time. You see your problem is you fail to understand that the most effective form of evil is a villain who wears a cheery smile. If I did everything your way the world would be ash and everyone would be trying to kill me.
2) Doing good things takes too long stupid (Sten): Ohh why thank you for your input stupid. How dare I take time out of our not so urgent mission to try to gain good will, experience, equipment, and everything required to actually do our mission. I should have just used that stick I found on the ground instead.
and
3) GARBLE GOO EVIL YEAH!!! Stupid: Stupid stupid stupid...

I am starting to think the vast majority of gamers are stupid people and game developers are trying to relate to their poor underdeveloped minds by creating characters who are so dumb that the players feel smart by comparison.

The problem is of course that you created characters so dumb that now I feel so dumb for even playing the game.

--

Pro-tip: In Dragon age... never EVER have Sten and Morrigan in your party at the same time. They are the two whinniest characters if you aren't being a total monster (which makes no sense in the context of the game... but it is bioware, punishing you for being malicious is not in their job description). Trade in Werewolf Pelts for cash and Morrigan will complain that you just stimulated the economy without running a baby punting stand and Sten will complain that earning that cash took so much time that you could have defeated the entire dark army and ignores the fact that the fur owner happens to have pull with the chief we need to defeat them.

And yet... you still can get to max relationship with them because people in Dragon Age can basically be bought. So basically...

No consequences

[scrdest]

Portraying a warzone as a set of isolated firefights in a walled-off piece of city with some heavily-scripted set pieces

Happens all the time in FPS games. Half-Life 2 finally got it right in that new NPC combatants constantly enter the fray from all sides with no specific scripting. The Striders especially went a long way towards the atmosphere, constantly destroying terrain and forcing me to dodge around all the time, scrounging for ammo to deal with them.

Again, Bethesda is a notable offender. It's not like they COULDN'T make Skyrim civil war more of a war and less of a series of skirmishes, since:

a) They initially planned to make it like that
b) WARZONES mod (discontinued) shows that it CAN be done.

[Neonivek]

Dang it Scrdest! after I made such a long post! NOO!

[timferius]

Not sure if this has been said but...

Impassible Locked Doors
Particularly bad when you can pick locks. Many great games have this problem, and I guess it makes sense, it just bugs me.
For example, the doors in HalfLife 2 with the combine lock things on them. Sure, I get that they're trying to save my time and energy by not having a series of empty rooms to poke through when I'm supposed to be in a hurry, but why are there even super-locks in a derlict apartment building?
Also, why can't my master lockpicker, who's broken in to all manner of places, open that one sewer grate? Oh, I need a key for this door. Well, if it takes a key, my picks should work!