Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I’m in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that’s something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
When you first start playing, you should be in a room that’s moderately graphically intense and you can stand there indefinitely doing nothing. I need some time to dial in my graphics settings and controls. I hate when a game immediately drops you into a combat situation and I’m joining the action 5 seconds at a time as I twiddle with settings.
Games that don’t act like they are games. Too many designers think they are making “high art”. Examples:
Not being able to save any time for any reason - I have a life, stuff happens. I need to be able to save and leave the game at any time - during gameplay, dungeons, cutscenes, any time. Make it a suspend state if it must - but respect reality.
Non-pausable cutscenes - you are not the most important part of my life so you need to be able to pause without losing content.
Non-skippable cutscenes - I might have seen this 10 times before, let me skip.
Dialogue history - if you let me skip dialogue then you must have a dialogue history. I might have hit the skip button by accident so let me see what I missed.
Indicate when there isn’t new dialogue - make the chat options change when there is new dialogue, making it so I have to interact with the NPC or object again just to see if there is new dialogue is infuriating.
Show when an activity will fail - don’t make me search barrels that are empty. Skyrim does this perfectly.
If you have a map let me annotate it - somehow a magicly populating map is allowed in your world but I don’t have a pencil to write “come back here with a shovel”?
Three first ones can also be game engine limitations. Im not saying its good desing and its always because the limitations, but there might be more happening under the hood that does not show to the end user. Things like quest stage flags or loading things behind the cut scenes.
Dialogue history i agree completelly. I love the way pillars of the eternity did this. I also loved how text refering to things like cities, characters and gods were highlighted and you could see short summary hovering your mouse over the higlighted text and clicking it opened the codex where you could read about the topic. This helped me immerse to game because my character would what the capital of the country is or what god uggapugga is. Also it helped when there was long times between game sessions.
About map markers. I like when i can add markers or text on the game map, but inherently i think game should do these things for you, either adding a symbol in the map, or adding something in to games quest log or codex. But on the other hand i lived in a era where if i wanted a map for game i needed to draw it by myself on the grid paper. The habit has stayed with me and in games like Dark souls, Remnant and blue prince i keep small notebook with me, where i write my notes and stupid theories. To me its really fun to read those scribles later and try to figure out what i have missed or how dumb i was.
Hollow knight, Project Zomboid, minecraft and Legend of Grimrock have all very different tools for you marking your map and in all of them the map system is part of the game desing and gameplay loop. While these games benefit from the map system to most of the games its just unnecessary. The ability to mark “digging spot #31” just is not necessary.
I love how in pillars of eternity and satisfactory you have in game notepads. And now days steam notepad is also great. You can even add screemshots to it, but i like my oldschool hand writing stuff more.
My job. No seriously, that’s my pet peeve. I could play so many more great games if I didn’t have to work.
- Games should have some way to take notes in game.
- External wikis are great and I love them, but they aren’t an excuse for not explaining how your game works within your game. There needs to be good in game guides.
- All games need some way to save and quit. Looking at you, rogue likes. People have lives. That’s more important than protecting some weird form of honor by making the excuse that it’s to prevent save scumming.
When you’re watching a dramatic cutscene, but then someone needs your attention, so you hit esc… which skips the cutscenes instead of pausing?! What the actual fuck? The button that pauses the game in every other context now (surprise!) skips the cutscene? Why would you do that?!
Internet for single player.
I love Hitman, but the need to be connected to a server just to play rubs me the wrong way.
When you know a choice you made should have immediate or impending consequences, but the world carries on as if it’s business as usual. I was actually surprised when the opposite happened in Outer Worlds 2 recently. If you trigger a certain event and don’t go deal with it ASAP, it will happen without you and there are consequences.
In theory this is really cool, but unless you really get into a game and are willing to replay, it just feels bad as a player missing content because of a timer you didn’t know about.
- I don’t give the slightest fuck who provided the middleware for the cloth physics, stop impeding me from playing the game to show me this shit every fucking time I launch it.
- Continue and New Game are often the wrong way around in the main menu. Why would you have New Game at the top/default selection position? How often would someone be clicking that as opposed to Continue?
- Unskippable dialogue and cut-scenes. I’ve read devs describe cut-scenes as a reward for the player achieving a certain milestone. I see them as punishment. Especially so if I want to replay the game. It’s a game, not a movie. Leave me the fuck alone already.
- It should be forbidden to sell a game on Steam that requires an account and launcher from Ubisoft or whoever. If you sell it on Steam, you use Steam, and if you wanna use your own shit then you don’t get to use the Steam storefront and must forgo all the advertising and exposure you enjoy there.
- Walk-and-talks, especially when my normal walk speed is like a sprint compared to that of the NPC in question.
- Narratively, my character is a saviour to a group of people who provide me with weapons and ammo to help me save them, but the cunts charge me for it?? “Hey thanks for single-handedly saving us and fighting the tyrannical evil empire, while you’re out there risking life and limb for us please use our cool weapons and bullets! That’ll be 500 credits, cheers!” Motherfucker? What are you even spending it on? WHERE are you even spending it?
- Fake endings. I was playing RDR2, and thought I was coming to the end of the game, all signs pointed to an imminent ending. So I was mentally in a place where I was ready to pack up and uninstall it, just had to finish the last few quests, already wondering what I’d play next. Then there’s an entire 500-hour chapter that comes after. So I keep going, and am constantly thinking “surely it’s just another quest or two…” but it just never fucking ends. Had I known or expected all this extra shit, it would be different. But I was already halfway out they door before you called me back in for another week’s worth of the same malarkey.
- Time-wasting as a core mechanic. I love No Man’s Sky, but so many of the quests in that game involve literally waiting 24 real-world hours for the next phase of the quest. Which, when completed, leads to another 24-hour wait. Who exactly does this serve?
For Stardew check your achievements and it will probably help to figure out what to do. If you made it to the island the room on the far west side has a checklist for getting “perfection” as well. When I finally got the movie theater I was also working on that checklist.
Yeah I have a bad habit of never finishing games despite playing the first 1/4 of the game several times.
I need a refresher like TV shows do when they come back for a new season.
I like somewhat buggy messes like Oblivion, but if your game keeps randomly crashing on me, like New Veags without stability mods, I will be pretty peeved after a while.
Same with games like Oaken Tower where, even though I cannot prove it, I swear they lower the odds of finding the items you have and need until you cannot afford it after rerolls and level ups and such. That, or you have a max upgraded item and it won’t stop giving you that specific item that you cannot use multiples of for whatever reason. Or you sell that item because it has stopped appearing in shop and decides to show up multiple times after selling and doing a singular reroll.
It’s a niche gripe because i like achievement hunting, but it kills a lot of motivation for me in a game when there’s separate achievements for a high difficulty. I feel like there’s been only 3 times i actively enjoyed it out of all the game’s i’ve done. That being Halo (it’s like a right of passage for that game’s culture, and Halo 2 is the only one that’s the worst), Uncharted 4, and The Last of Us Part II.
There’s also games that are just overloaded with stuff. I’m not sure how to describe it, but a lot of games i’ve run into just feel like they had a ton of stuff shoved in and it just throws me off. The Sonic adventure games were like this for me
I started keeping a Note on my phone titled Game Diary with different sections for games I’m playing, and write down what I was doing, my train of thought and what I wanted to do next, things I had to check on our fix etc, at the time I put it down. It’s helped immensely when I come back to something after a while and encounter exactly what you’re talking about.
Biggest pet peeve of modern games is when the game repeatedly nags the player to go to the next mission or solve a puzzle. I like to explore games, to take the time to appreciate well made environments and lore, but when npcs or even the pc keep chiming in every minute with “[x] is waiting for me at the lab” or “I think I should [y]”, it starts to piss me off.
It’s like they don’t trust the player to play the game “right”. Games are more than just sprinting from one objective to another. Can’t even take the time to fully look over a puzzle before the game starts telling you what to do next.
“Quick! A giant meteor is heading for our planet! Collision is expected in less than a week!”
…but if I sleep 7 times while doing all this level grinding and doing sidequests, nothing goes wrong…
That’s a quirk of the medium I’ve learned to accept. Some games do it well by having chunks of “on-rails” bits and others of “free-roam” based on what’s happening in the story so that it makes more sense.
Menu -> Exit Game -> Yes
Scroll Down - > Exit Game -> Yes
Scroll Down -> Exit to Desktop -> Yes
Exit Launcher -> Yes
Jackbox is one of the worst offenders of this. Have to exit 4 times to actually exit the game.
Yeah, but accidentally clicking the quit button when you meant to click options or whatever and the game just instantly dropping you at the desktop is equally as annoying. Two click exit is a good compromise. Four is way too many though.
Alt+F4 is your friend!
Or on Steam Deck, quit the game using the steam menu.
I do appreciate the games that give you quit and quit to desktop in the same menu.
