Progress bars going to 100%. Many games are guilty of this, Baldur's Gate 3 most recently. If 100% are loaded, why am I seeing the loading screen still? The game should be starting. You're clearly not at 100% if I'm still watching the loading screen. It should be impossible to see a fully filled progress bar.
Artificially make progress bars stop at 99% if you must, it's still better than watching 100% being a clear lie.
Inventory Management. Doesn't matter what game it is. If you can get over-encumbered and it's not relevant to the game play like a survival crafting game or something I fucking hate it. There's no reason I should have to make 40 trips to pick everything up in a Skyrim dungeon if I want to. It just wastes time.
I despise hub worlds - don’t make me walk around a map to access menu options. I’m currently playing Division 2 and can’t stand to find all of the people to just play the game.
The number of games that do this is to long to list: Destiny, Darktide, Fireteam.
Not my favorite game, but one I've been playing a lot recently is Deep Rock Galactic and I absolutely hate how most menus are physical terminals you have to walk up to interact, it's unecessary busywork. And the baffling part is you can press tab to open the mission select menu, but that's it, no other shortcuts! Why even have multiple in-game terminals?!
And to a lesser degree, the crassus detonator enemy. I absolutely despise spotting one in-game because I just know I'm going to be forced to spend the next 15 minutes mining a gold sphere inside out, it completely and utterly destroys the game flow. In summary, it blows up when dead and anything nearby in a big sphere turns into gold, the slowest mineral to mine in-game. Usually when I'm soloing I just ignore the gold, but cooping I usually don't get the satisfaction. It's infuriating because it's such a simple fix, make it drop gold nuggets instead of making the scenary around it gold, but no, gotta ruin the game flow for whatever reason.
Witcher 3 doesnt need leveled enemies or loot. There is already a wide enough variety of monsters and equipment to convey player progression, and the leveling only exists to make sure that Geralt is as vulnerable to human enemies at the end of the game as the beginning.
That's great! That's the kind of world it is. I just don't think you need constantly increasing hitpoints & a loot treadmill to keep it that way.
The crosshairs/reticule in Elder Scrolls Online. I know it can be disabled with a mod, but the fact that disabling it when your weapon is sheathed is not a basic setting is completely baffling.
Stardew Valley: I really enjoy the game and play it on PC. It saves the game only at end of turn which is a game day. If I'm not able to finish my turn I have to put the computer to sleep instead of shut it down. Also if I make a mistake which is easy to do I have to start from the last save which can lose a good amount of progress and sometimes random pickups. Though it's my only peeve with the game so it's still doing better than most.
I wish the lower weapon skills in Morrowind didn't outright miss and make an unsatisfying "swish" sound. Maybe just reduce the damage or something, the early game is so rough because of this.
Current game pet peeve - the delay after each enemy acts in combat in Baldur's Gate 3. I absolutely love this game, but big combats take longer than they should because after each enemy acts, there seems to be a 5-10 second delay before moving on to the next.
Favorite game pet peeve - The overall poor performance/memory management in HBS's Battletech game. Again, love the game, have put nearly 2000 hours into it over the years, but damn the performance can just be painful sometimes.
Idk what id call my favorite but the game im currently playing is Borderlands 3 and the most annoying thing is how much spoken dialog there is. I just want to tell the npcs to shut up. Even with skipping the cut scenes there is still too much talking. The worst part is even if you walk away they still talk over the echonet. I just want to hear the badass music and guns and occasional quip from the enemies. I dont care about how much tyreen wants to suckle the vaults tits, or about her imaginary sub/dom fantasies about me.
Environments you can't interact with. There's shit lying around and I'm rolling my way through here. I would really like there to be physics so that the world around me is affected by what I'm doing.
Too many invisible walls. Is it really necessary to stop me from jumping around the courtyard gardens (ff16)? Let me get all up close and personal with the environment. Let me yeet myself off a random cliff.
Related: buildings that you can't go into. Yes the outside world might be cool and interesting but it's so much more immersive and realistic if buildings have interiors that you can go into. Half the fun I have in the older Pokémon games is exploring and just checking out the unique towns, listening to the town music etc, but the newest Pokémon games... If it's a building you can interact with at all, it's just a menu screen?? No visiting random apartment blocks and department stores?
And then lastly, have few to no NPCs, and if the ones that are there just stand still and don't do anything. It really annoyed me about so many of the kingdom hearts games, that you have these cool worlds that you've seen in movies and are explorable, but in all the spin off titles, there isn't a single NPC to be found in any of the worlds. It's so big and empty and boring. Let me allow myself to believe we're visiting these video game worlds and viewing a snapshot of what fantasy life is like in this video game.
I like playing modern warfare. My pet peeve is twofold
1st, online is completely unplayable because of script kiddies having to cheat because they think their k-d ratios are more important than letting people have fun that want to play it they way it’s designed.
2nd on the campaigns the enemy players can shoot you through walls and kill you, but if you see them and try to shoot them through the walls, the walls become bulletproof.
Another game I like is GTAV online. They should get rid of the ability to buy virtual money packs. Not everyone can afford to pay $100 for $10 million virtual dollars to buy the shit that gives them the essence of i destruct ability. Oppressors come to mind on this. You can steal peoples cars left and right but if you steal an oppressor they can reclaim it while you are in mid flight killing you.
Favourite game is Mass Effect 1, but I don't think I have a pet peeve because a lot of them have been said before (love the Mako though, it's just that the planets BioWare built are all fucking hills!)
But I think my pet peeve for Mass Effects 2 are 2 things.
The fact that there aren't scars in 2. Unless you use mods, but I like having my Shep's look battle-worn.
That BioWare made Shepard work with Cerberus. Like I get it in the idea of "the Alliance isn't saving people, but Cerberus did". But it feels so wrong especially if you played Mass Effects 1 where you can see the experiments Cerberus did on civilians. That and if you have the Sole Survivor background, it's a real slap in the face.
I know that they did 2 for storyline purposes, but the fact that you can't push back or anything makes 0 sense. And they also did it for people who never played 1. I just, ugh. It angers me. I love that 2 gave me my Garrus romance, but man, I just... yeah.
Being unable to open (kick in) a wooden door as a level whatnot Dragonborn because it is "locked". Looking at you Skyrim and Assassin's Creed.
Being unable to jump over a small hurdle or being allowed to climb only in certain situations like in Far Cry 6. Like, is this a Parcours game now or what? There's even a Parcours "armour" set.
Terrible inventory GUIs. AC Valhalla is one of the worst games inventory-wise. Decades ago video games did the job perfectly, there's no excuse for best practice degradation
Games where you cannot see your exact dialogue choices. I really like Fallout 4 but I cannot play the game with the four generic options. It's what kept me from beating LA Noire
In Star Ocean: The Last Hope, it's really hard to have a balanced party while keeping all your party members trained up. A lot of older RPGs have this issue because of the lack of EXP sharing for reserve party members, but this game stands out as being rather new (2009) in respect to those older RPGs.
And on that note, controversial opinion: EXP sharing is a good thing! It cuts down on unnecessary grinding and gets you through the story faster, which helps with pacing in a lot of games.
As much as I hate to admit it, Battlefield 2042 has become one of my favorite video games. The gameplay is a lot better than when it first came out.
But the helicopter mechanics suck compared to Battlefield Hardline. I knew they couldn’t put helicopters in V or in 1 (which for those unaware were their WW2 and WW1 games, the two released in sequence after Hardline, which was basically cops vs robbers), so I was excited to have a more modern game with bigger maps and helicopters to fly.
Because flying helicopters is so fun. It’s hard, because they use simple physics to control the helicopters: the blades will pull the craft whatever direction is “up” for them.
In 2042 it feels like there’s training wheels on the helicopters, which makes it a little easier to learn to fly them without crashing, but it makes certain maneuvers impossible.
One thing I like doing in Hardline is tilting the machine so far forward that my lift becomes zero and I just plummet straight down. I’d do this to take cover behind a building, then I’d pull out of the dive before hitting the ground.
You can’t do that in 2042. Full forward on the stick doesn’t tip you forward far enough to lose lift. It just puts you at “full tilt”. I mean, you can crash into the ground but it’s really hard. And diving at free fall speeds isn’t possible.
Hardline’s helicopter just feels smoother. My hunch is it’s a way simpler model of the controls. It’s probably unrealistic as hell, but it feels more real because the game will actually let you just turn the chopper over.
It creates space to screw up and to do amazing things, which they’ve taken out of 2042. So you’re less likely to plant straight into a rock on your first flight, but also less likely to actually dodge a missile by outmaneuvering it.
When the enemy AI suicidially rushes you, especially throwing grenades, to deal any damage. Meanwhile, I have limited ammo and grenades but I can't get new grenades from enemy soldiers because they use them up on me.
Stellaris has gotten especially bad with pacifist empires building huuuge fleets that just hang out during peace time. Then they go all in on the next war that they are overprepared for, even though they could not possibly predict it. And they fight like rabid wombats, not rabbits.
My favorite vintage game is Mega Man X. My pet peeve is that Capcom completely forgot about the franchise. I wish they would have given it the Mega Man 9/10 treatment where they make a new one in the style of the original. If they did that, I would probably legitimately cry from joy.
Days Gone, if you are aiming a gun and then do a roll or sprint, it comes back to crosshair/aim mode again when you stop moving. Dangerous when you are fighting hordes and exiting aiming mode slows you down and often I wind up accidentally toggling it right back on again.
This goes for any game, but especially Destiny 2 because of the way Bungie lets players interact with different menus during loading screens: I hate getting kicked out of menus when I finally land on a destination, especially if it’s a social area. It’s pretty obnoxious if you’re tweaking parts of your loadout and then have to dive back into the menus to get back where you were.
IMO, Bloodborne is an almost perfect game, design-wise. But I just wish it didn't have chromatic aberration. I hate it in every game and the fact that one of my favorite games has this shit built in and you can't turn it off will always bother me.
Also the performance is horrible but I don't think many people would disagree with me on that.
Funnily enough about Stellaris iirc they actually said in their last update this week that in 3.9 or whatever the next patch is they are “reworking some habitat functionality.” Not sure if it will make late game better or worse. 🤷♂️
It's Quake II, yes I'm old but they just remastered it and you should check it out. There's a nice difficulty curve up until the last two levels, which are basically the easiest levels in the entire game. Seriously, the last boss which has been hyped up the entire game just stands in his corner shooting easy to dodge BFGs, and can be killed in about a minute, even faster if you use Quad damage.