My Video Game Pet Peeves

Everybody has their own likes and dislikes in the world of video games. That’s one of the things that’s so magical about the industry; it appeals to such a wide audience because the variety in games is rivaled by none. As Tim Cain, director of the original Fallout, likes to say, “There are no bad games; there are only bad games for me.” While I’m not sure if I subscribe 100% to that claim, I certainly see where he’s coming from and believe in it to a certain degree. I can recognize that, like anybody, there are a ton of things that I can’t stand in video games that others absolutely love or at least can tolerate. I was recently reminded of this when playing a game with my girlfriend that drives me up the wall. That inspired me to come here and talk about my personal pet peeves in video games. Here they are:

Too Much Downtime

I start this point by wishing a belated happy May the 4th to anyone reading. May the 4th be with you. You’ll see why I mention that in a second.

I can appreciate some downtime in games, but I don’t take well to games that take the foot off the gas. Here’s the question, though: what is the gas? Simply put, it’s the primary gameplay loop; it’s the part that the developers likely spent the most time on; it’s the meat and potatoes; it’s the fun part of the game; it’s the selling point; it’s the draw. This is important to define because this changes between genres and games within those genres. In a business simulation game, the gas is the problem solving that comes with balancing employee happiness, customer satisfaction, and profit margins. Action-packed wouldn’t be an apt term to describe that kind of gameplay, but it’s the gas. In a platform fighting game like Smash Brothers, the gas is the moment-to-moment combat where the players attempt to gain an advantage over one another.

Anything outside of these things for these games could fall under “downtime”.

For May 4th, I decided to continue my drawn-out playthrough of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor with my girlfriend. I’m also in the middle of a playthrough of Avowed. The day before, I played Avowed for around five hours with only a bit of noticeable fatigue. Jedi: Survivor, on the other hand, felt taxing and laborious after less than 90 minutes. A number of things contributed to this, but primarily, I grow tired in Jedi: Survivor of fighting a new group of enemies for 10 seconds and then spending the next 60 seconds loading my last save and traveling back to the enemies for another sub-10-second fight.

This is a terrible ratio that permeates a lot of souls-like games, hence why I don’t play very many of them. I love Star Wars, though, and my girlfriend has been very excited for me to play the Jedi games from Respawn. If it wasn’t for that, though, I likely would have never finished Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order or started Jedi: Survivor. It’s hard for me to fathom how anyone could enjoy a 6:1 ratio of nothing happening to main gameplay loop. A sore thumb often punctuates a session of Jedi: Survivor because I spend so much of the game holding my joystick up to walk Cal back to a group of enemies or a mission area.

I’ve spent enough time on this point, but I’ll mention another game with similar issues that I overall enjoyed was Control. From the moment I encountered a powerful enemy to the moment I defeated them, I would spend probably 50% of my time in loading screens and 20% running back to the fight. Should the fun part really only be 30% of the experience?

No Sense of Direction

I’m a gamer who leans more toward wanting games to hold my hand. Sandbox games often feel too open and directionless for me to enjoy. Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do? What experience is the game trying to drive me to? Sandbox games answer these questions with, “It’s up to you! Do what you want!“ That’s cool and all, but what I hear is, “Do our jobs for us! You figure out what’s fun about our game!” A game should know its strong suites and point you toward experiencing that.

I’ll often find this approach in simulation games or games that dip their toes into the simulation waters, as well. My two recent examples of this are Let’s School and Schedule 1. To be fair, Schedule 1 is in Early Access as of writing this, so that could change. They have strong starts, giving the player clear, defined goals to grow their business and experience new aspects of the game. After a short while, though, the games just stop and declare, “That’s all we have for you. Now continue to get better.“

My issue with this is the new, malleable form of the goal posts. What does success mean anymore? Just more money? More customers? That seems logical, but that’s an infinite goal. You can always have more. You’re no longer following any kind of narrative or structure. The game ends up stagnating because it doesn’t seem to have much more to show you. Because of that, the game falls flat and feels over prematurely. The best way to sidestep this landmine, in my opinion, is to create at least one overarching goal that signals the end of the main game. As an example for a generic business simulation game, the player has to buy out the number one company in their industry. Once that’s done, you’ve essentially completed the game! A good simulation game would tell the player that the they’ve finished the main content but encourage them to keep playing past that point to see how far they can get. Then it’s up to the player to keep playing and create their own goals or hang up the game knowing they accomplished what the game set out for them.

This extends into other genres as well, though. It also touches other, smaller aspects of games that greatly affect the experience. One of the brilliant things Naughty Dog does is use color and light to direct the player. It’s a form of environmental game design that tells the player where they go to continue the story. It helps avoid players feeling lost while keeping them immersed in the setting. To pick on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor again, this is something Respawn didn’t do particularly well. The visual communication is not up to snuff. Sometimes you see things that look like they should be climbable, but they’re not, so you fall to your death. Sometimes you have to stop and decipher if the place you’re looking at over a cliff is reachable or just there as set dressing. These are consequences of a failure in communicating direction to the player.

This is a surefire way to get me to put a game down and not return to it. The fun part of a game for me is not figuring out where the fun part is. Developers should be foaming at the mouth, desperate to shove the fun parts of their game in your face. Leaving the player to wander tells me that the development team has little confidence in where the fun parts of their game are.

Poorly Designed Stealth

Stealth presents a lot of difficult game design decisions that require a lot of testing, iteration, and, therefore, time. This explains why so often a game either focuses primarily on stealth (like Desperados III or Dishonored) or shoehorns it in.

Open-world games in particular tend to offend me in this regard. A long time ago, game developers somehow decided that action-adventure, open-world games needed to have stealth as a mechanic. However, many of the designers don’t put the same time and effort into making stealth a robust system worthy of the other fun mechanics in their games. Stealth ends up taking a back seat to the rest of the game, leaving the player feeling cheated. Any system that the development team puts into the game should feel important to the experience. Otherwise, it turns into time wasted for both the creative minds who spent years producing the game and the player who spent years waiting for it.

The game I’m most engaged in currently, Avowed, struggles with this. There are other areas of the game that I feel could’ve received more attention, more balancing, more tweaking. Instead, though, the team poured resources into creating a stealth system that, for all intents and purposes, ought to not be there. Enemies typically come in groups of three or more, and no matter how many enemies there are or how much grass there is to stealth through, I can never stealth attack more than a single enemy in any given encounter. The stealth mechanics were clearly undertested, didn’t receive as many iterations as other game mechanics, and considered an afterthought in the development process. One of the most important things that make stealth in video games work is carefully designed encounters that intentionally leave openings for stealth.

Naughty Dog does an extremely impressive job with this, especially in the first The Last of Us game. Enemies have different pathing, weaknesses, strengths, and behaviors that affect stealth in the game. Encounters are carefully planned out to allow the player to surpass the encounter via stealth, a firefight, or a bit of both; enemies pause for enough time to allow players the chance to pounce on them, but not so long that the tension is ruined; enemies can lose sight of you, creating the opportunity for multiple sections of stealth within the same enemy encounter; an entire listening mechanic and upgrades for it were developed to supplement stealth, making it feel unique, engaging, and fair. What’s more amazing is that all of this serves the settings and narrative beautifully. Stealth is not only a well-designed mechanic, but it’s an essential part of surviving in a post-apocalyptic world with few resources (such as ammo) and an abundant supply of danger.

Compare this to a game like Avowed where stealth… exists.

Grinding

For me, the amount of fun in a game and the number of times I have to repeat the same exact tasks are inversely proportional.

I simply cannot get into MMOs because of the culture that has been built around them. This culture is one of gamers who love to pick up a game for several hours a day and just grind the same stuff over and over again. I like when my games keep it fresh. I want to see the game I’m playing evolve as I progress. What I don’t want is an endless supply of enemies to fight so that I can level up and start grinding higher levels. When games start to feel grindy, I turn them off and do something else that I can feel more swept up in.

In single-player games as well, such as the Persona games, grinding is my least favorite part of the game. Without the grinding, the game would be much more consistently fun and quicker to experience. In simulation games, too, the game stagnates and gets stale very quickly if it refuses to introduce new mechanics or scenarios.

To me, the idea of taking a single activity and stretching it across 10, 20, 50, 100 hours of gameplay with nothing to add to it sucks. Period. End of story.

Too Many Lore Notes

A message to all open-world developers: stop relying on random pieces of paper to tell your world’s story for you. When every bit of lore that comes to writers’ heads is written down and scattered in books and notes around every corner of your game, you’re doing too much. There are certainly aspects of your world’s lore that you would love for your players to know, but less can often be more.

What I mean is that when there is one fewer journal, letter, note, or history book lying around, then each other one in the game becomes that much more valuable. I think the best games use this technique sparingly to communicate lore and narrative details that have the biggest impact. A lot of times, the big allure of a setting is the unknown nature of it. Nobody fell in love with Star Wars because the lore was just so well thought out. On the contrary, it became a phenomenon partially because it was a brand-new world that let imaginations run away with it. People grasped onto it because there was so much left unsaid and, therefore, so much left for the audience to interpret and envision.

The latest games to come out of Rockstar have left zero memories of reading useless notes and ledgers, but I and a lot of other people have fallen in love with them. In fact, Red Dead Redemption 2 might be one of the best games at precisely this. The basic mechanic of note reading is in the game. However, it’s wrapped up differently than in a game such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Red Dead 2 has the player read lore about characters via snappy examinations of things like pictures. The player looks at a picture of a character they know in a completely different past life, allowing the player to fill in the gaps and make assumptions about the journey this character has gone through. Occasionally, you may find a picture with something written on it; it’s not usually anything more than names, dates, and quickly scribbled notes. This is a game that balances presenting the player with lore while removing the obligation to care about it.

These five pet peeves don’t always make a game unplayable, bad, or even just average. Lots of great games have one or two of these issues. However, any time these items are present, that means the rest of the experience has to be that much more polished and outstanding for me to enjoy it. When a game fails to do that, it starts making its way down to the bottom of my list.