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[Kagus]

I wish someone would make a realistic hunting mod. Animals will flee from your scent, mostly before you can see them. If you wound one, it runs away so you have to spend hours tracking it. That sounds like the best use of my gaming time, right there.

Have you heard the Good News?

[pisskop]

  You know, I tried it, and while I do like it, I almost immediately feel like its sinking into a repetitive rhythm.  I admit I only made it to Autumn before saying this, but I feel like there's an incredibly simple 'tree' of progress in that game.

  Since it seems there is less and less time to play games as I get older and older, it strikes me as a shame.

[amjh]

I really hate how the Dark souls games are treated like some kind of perfect divine objects. People don't want to say anything bad about them because they want the tough guy points for "liking" them. But hey are full of massive flaws with cheating AI and obstacles requiring memorization and trial-and-error to pass.

[Rolan7]

They really are.  The first entry seemingly deliberately avoids explaining its own mechanics, and punishes experimentation if you have any "humanity".

[amjh]

It wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't an infinite army of fanboys going "lol noob" whenever anyone voices any criticism.

[MrRoboto75]

claptrap can use stairs in The Pre-Sequel

[Broseph Stalin]

I have three big ones

1. Character trades quest minor progress for a major side quest. I find this enraging because the came typically frames it as them being an okay person. In Fallout 3 I have wandered into the world looking for my father who has left for unclear reasons, is in uncertain danger,  and may be getting further and further away. Three Dog could help me out by saying the words "rivet city" instead he asks you to do a quest for him first. In New Vegas, Honored Hearts DLC your caravan is butchered and your lost in the grand canyon, you need a map to navigate the crags and get back home, a quick look with a paper and pencil would be sufficient. Josh Graham and Daniel hold this information hostage, keeping you trapped in unfamiliar country until you do about a hundred quests for them. In Kingdom Come Deliverance Melichar refuses to let you speak to a prisoner until you cure a plague. You have been ordered to your lord to speak to the prisoner and if you dawdle there may be a massacre. This one gets a little bit of a pass because the prisoner has the plague but Melichar flat out refuses to let you see him.

In each situation I killed everyone involved and was treated as a bad guy. Note that I never wanted anything from these characters, we were not exchanging equivalent favors. I needed directions, directions, and a guy to open his barn. Actively harming my interests is not a friendly act, if I am a good character stopping me from achieving my goals makes you a bad guy. I subsequently hated each of these characters regardless of how well they were written or relatable they were because you introduced them as massive pricks.

2. Problems that exist because my character is a big dumb dummy. This can be getting captured, defeated, or outsmarted in a cutscene or just your character being blindsided by something that you immediately picked up on as a player. There are too many examples, this is a favorite of terrible writers. If you need the character to be vulnerable snatch control from the player and make them act like an idiot. I think Hitman Absolution may be the best example. 47 tries to murder a bodyguard who is basically an oil tanker made of meat. He is easily overpowered and instantly knocked unconscious. This is a series where half of the gameplay is about not killing bodyguards in fact killing bodyguards is the mark of a poor player. If you were going to kill him why not shoot him in the back of the head? Why not do one of a hundred things that aren't stupid? Because then it would make less sense that you were easily defeated.  In KCD you question someone who is clearly lying to you and acting suspiciously, you have no option to call him on it or tell somebody to watch him and he runs away before you find evidence that confirms he knows more than he was saying.

This isn't necessary and some games actually do it right. Batman: Arkham Asylum the joker escapes and initiates his plan despite the player character behaving reasonably and intelligently. In that cutscene you think "wow the Joker's dangerous" not "wow I am playing as a moron."

3. Unanswerable dickery, a character who repeatedly antagonizes you that you have no recourse against. In Skyrim Maven Blackbriar insults, belittles, and threatens the protagonist who may be the worlds deadliest warrior, greatest assassin, and most powerful mage who in their spare time screams at dragons until they die. You never get to do anything about it and she's mechanically unkillable. In KCD after tending to the sick you're sent to jail (by a single guard) for requesting someone supply your former neighbors and victims of war with enough food to eat. For me this happened while my sword was literally stained with the blood of the last twelve unfortunate motherfuckers who tried to arrest me, seriously I got stopped by guards on my way to the quest and an actual trail of bodies led to the quest marker. The louse in question is unkillable.

There are games where a character messes with you and then anticlimactically disappears but I think this is a bigger problem in rpgs with an open world. Sure, maybe some characters have to be flagged as essential, if that's the case I think they should have to sob uncontrollably and wet their pants when confronted with violence- if someone has to act out of character and be humiliated for the story to work then why should it be the player?

[NullForceOmega]

On that subject, asshole NPCs.  If there are one or two in particular, I'm not bothered, but in Bethesda games in particular just about every single NPC you run into who isn't a 'designated protag buddy' is a complete jackass.  It isn't normal, reasonable, or acceptable to treat someone you are meeting for the first time like complete shit.  Guarded caution, sure.  Question my intentions?  That's fair.  Act like I'm some miserable shitstain who doesn't have the right to breath the same air as you?  If the character doesn't have a damned good reason for it you're just flat out insulting me and as a game creator you need to have someone scream obscenities at you day after day, hour after hour, until you don't ever want to hear an insult again in your miserable life.

Also the cutscene beatdown.  I hate that goddamn shit so hard.  If in every other situation my character is allowed to be an unstoppable death machine then there is no justification to ever pull this shit, it is your job as a creator to find a way to motivate me to approach the problem from a different angle, not take away my agency to enforce a bullshit narrative.  My single favorite example of this garbage is the Fallout 3 DLC The Pitt.  Why?  Because after the beatdown I was able to immediately go on a hate-fueled murder rampage anyway, killed every single NPC I was allowed to kill and of course immediately failed the DLC mission (this should be a clear example of just how much I hate this mechanism, in the years since then I have completed the DLC many times).  Then in the so-called best written DLC-sized mod  for Fallout 3, Alton, il, The hack of a mod author didn't pull this stupid stunt once, nor twice, but three goddamn times, and then tried to sell me on the idea that the cannibalistic vault dwelling shitheads who commited all three of these incidences were somehow in the right, despite the fact that anyone with even an ounce of common sense can see that they desperately need to be violently murdered for their numerous willful heinous acts perpetrated against what were primarily poorly armed civilians and their barely adequate defenders.

[Broseph Stalin]

Oh god I forgot about the Pitt. You kill four raiders to get through the gate, when the gate opens you're frozen in place and then four raiders beat you unconscious. I mean seriously, why would you have four raiders beat up the player character after you just established the player character could very easily kill four raiders.

[NullForceOmega]

Especially when the means to go full-bore Rambo on their asses can be acquired within seconds of waking up.  I could not even comprehend how inexcusably stupid that scenario was.  I have just while writing this sentence come up with four alternatives that would have been better than, "hurr durr some poorly equipped raiders just club 'em down when they get through the gate!"

I walked into that place at level thirty in max condition Hellfire PA carrying Vengeance with around 20k ec ammo, with the Atomic Pulverizer as a backup weapon with around 5k alien power cells, and around a thousand stimpacks because I almost never needed to use any.  I had basically soloed the entire Enclave (with allowance for Libby to get his murder on), had purged Zeta of everything not human, and cleared the Anchorage simulation like the avatar of death itself, but four punk raiders managed to render me unconscious, 'because plot'.

[SeriousConcentrate]

Yeah, at least in the main game they had the decency for a flashbang out of nowhere. It wasn't great or anything, but at least it's something that could conceivably stun you long enough for the Enclave to capture you.

[NullForceOmega]

I admit I was a little irritated at that one, but I didn't feel like I was being arbitrarily screwed over, at the least there were (supposedly) properly trained soldiers performing that op, and they had actual surprise on their side.  In contrast the only warning those raiders had was their buddies suddenly being turned to piles of dust and their gate being kicked in by an armored titan.

[TamerVirus]

On that subject, asshole NPCs.  If there are one or two in particular, I'm not bothered, but in Bethesda games in particular just about every single NPC you run into who isn't a 'designated protag buddy' is a complete jackass.

Do you go to the Cloud District very often?

[Darkmere]

Heh, there was a player-made content campaign for one of the Shadowrun games. You're fighting on a dock, and the Big Ork Baddie has sicced his mooks on you. You pin them down on the dock, kill mooks, and the Ork just activates his plot armor and runs through your entire squad.

I mean, there's a boat in the water next to him, which would have made sense, but nah, this guy suddenly shrugs off a ton of bullets to run right into melee range and out the other side.

Oh and later on his entire elite command team are rendered invulnerable by random mooks you have to shoot in a certain order. Because... reasons. Also you have to guess the order. While under fire.

[NullForceOmega]

On that subject, asshole NPCs.  If there are one or two in particular, I'm not bothered, but in Bethesda games in particular just about every single NPC you run into who isn't a 'designated protag buddy' is a complete jackass.

Do you go to the Cloud District very often?

Considering what I said there this is going to sound strange, but I don't actually share the relentless Nazeem hate that grips the Skyrim community.  I do actively dislike him, but his casual antagonism is completely in-character so I actually feel pretty comfortable with it.  Its random passers-by insulting me that really pisses me the fuck off.  The idea of 'if you don't have anything polite to say keep your mouth shut' exists precisely because heavily armed strangers are potentially dangerous and shouldn't be antagonized, so why do so many 'thesda NPCs seem to be horribly suicidal?  edit: Is it because they know they're in a Bethesda game?  Is that why they want me to kill them?  Have... have I been denying them salvation by being the better person and ignoring them?