Title is tongue in cheek, of course—they probably are gamers. I get that making a game is complex and full of trade-offs, and you can’t please everyone. Still, there are certain design decisions that just feel like they weren’t made by people who play games regularly.
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Top-down/twin-stick games where the aim (especially on controller) uses camera handling features, like smoothing the input or a cross-shaped deadzone.
Screenshake enabled by default, or not even an option to disable.
Don’t know if it’s due to not playing games, but why tf is motion blur almost always on by default?
Can you bring up the pause menu at any point (including cut scenes).
I’ve always felt like a sign of a well polished game was one where the pause menu would work at any point, including during cutscenes.
Are there actually games that allow this?
Yakuza: Like a Dragon does this and I’m grateful.
I seem to remember even FF7 allowing this.
Bayonetta games do. Opens a specific pause menu with skipping option.
Pretty sure Half Life 1 and 2 work that way, since the cutscenes happen entirely in game
The worst is when the start button instantly skips the cutscene with no confirmation/warning
Playing the metal gear collection and this immediately stood out. The cutscenes are long
One thing, and it’s likely just an oversigt, but controls. With Consoles being the computers that everything is designed for, the lack of proper controls for Mouse & Keyboard have become a bit of a nuisance.
Normally, it’s not a big deal. You just configure them yourself.
But it did irk me some when I gave Cyberpunk a go and tried to switch the Interact/select button from (F) to (E) and it didn’t move both functionalities. Now (E) was Interact, but in menus it defaulted back to (F) as if menu select was apparently a different function.
Alternatively, when the console control scheme is tight and well made but the PC controls are ASDF + whatever random keys spread at opposite ends of the keyboard.
Yup, it’s a peeve. I don’t know why the buttons just get thrown onto the keyboard with a shovel.
Who thought crouch belongs on ( C) and Interact goes on (F) or even (X)? I get (F) if the game has a peek-mechanic, but most don’t.
Just use (E). And crouch & sprint has always been on (Ctrl) & (Shift) respectively. It’s the optimal configuration with WASD.
When a freshly installed game starts at max volume
Long cutscenes that don’t let you save or pause when anything comes up that forces you to leave the keyboard or just focus elsewhere.
“Control” was the worst wrt this (or was it Quantum Break? Maybe both). I was just about to go to bed when it showed me a “cutscene” that went on for more than 30 minutes. Turned out later that you could actually go back to watch it again afterwards, but there was no indication of that at the time.
That would have been Quantum Break. I don’t recall Control having any one cutscene that long.
But Quantum Break did the whole video-game/TV-series hybrid media thing, and was full of “episodes” that were essentially 30-minute cutscenes.
The Steam Deck is great in that regard. Just put it to sleep.
Same with the Switch and easily one of the top features. Laundry done? Sleep mode. SO asks something? Sleep mode. Done pooing? Sleep mode.
I’m playing through Control now and haven’t encountered that (fun game btw!), so methinks it’s Quantum Break you’re thinking of.
I agree with you, though. Sometimes I have to step away for whatever reason and end up missing something because I can’t pause.
When going from point a to point b takes ages or is otherwise a pain. I get you worked hard on your world, but it losses its charm the 10th time running across it.
And don’t force me to hold/tap a button to sprint. Or worse, make me click in the left stick.
It’s not the time or distance, its the barren wasteland of no content in between A and B. I’ll hold W down for 30 minutes no problem as long as it’s interesting.
I’ll go first: when mouse sensitivity is unbalanced by default—horizontal movement is way faster than vertical—and the game only allows you to change the overall sensitivity for both axes together.
E-mail the developers that you know they’re using ultrawides and will literally never figure out how. And that’s part of the problem.
Quick Time Events; characters that automatically do 60 things just by holding down “forward” on the joystick; the Ubisoft logo.
Putting a QTE or a limited time choice in a long cutscene or a level segment.
When maxing out the damage stat just makes your game trivially easy.
Stat systems are hard and prone to optimization problems. But c’mon, you at least gotta test the glass cannon build that you know everyone’s gonna try first.
When the game is such a precious labour of love, so obviously cared for, and constantly improved, that there’s no way the dev has any time left for gaming.
When you can’t tap a button to fill the text dialogue, and have to wait for each letter to individually populate for 15 speech bubbles in a row.
I just played through Pentiment and even on the fastest speed dialogues were painfully slow. It wouldn’t fix all the other pacing issues, but the text popping up instantly would be a huge improvement.
I loved that game and I love the setting and art, but it’s soooo much reading. And I love reading, I really do! But it began to wear me down near the end.
I have very mixed feelings about it. I also adored the art and setting, and I really appreciate the historical research that has gone into making it. And there were some well written characters in there.
But man, the game is sloooooow. The last act in particular was like pulling teeth. Reading is fine when what you’re reading about is interesting. There were so many banal, shallow and uninteresting conversations in there that really tested my patience.
or even worse when you have to wait for the voiced dialogue to finish before it lets you continue.
I’ve been replaying Dragon Quest Builders 2. The game isn’t voiced, most of dialogues are classic RPG text boxes that you can speed up and skip, BUT. There are special lines of dialogue that are “voices” in a character’s head.
They are unskippable, and they’re like a dozen words each that stay on screen for about 20 seconds or more. Some of those dialogues have about 6-7 of those. It’s unbearable, and it’s genuinely the worst part of starting a game again. Hell, it was the worst part of doing it the first time, too.
Somehow English localisation created this, in Japanese the messages go a lot faster. Though even those couldn’t be skipped, because… fuck you that’s why.
I like that BG3 let’s you skip the voice dialogue but I wish there was an option to speed up the voice acting because I really love the voice acting and the story is great but I find myself spacing out during long cutscenes. I don’t want to skip them I just want them to speak quickly!
They work for Ubisoft or Bethesda
When things aren’t balanced. It either tells me the devs do not play their game or they have a dominant strategy and don’t bother playing anything else.
I’ve heard stories from professionals and you would be surprised how many devs don’t actually play the game they are developing.
In almost every game the gameplay tips and tutorials they give you are not only suboptimal but often outright counterproductive. This is especially bad in multiplayer games.
It was really nice in Doom Eternal, where they added quick swapping to the tips.
I’ve been streaming recently, and one thing that stands out to me is when you first boot up a game and it doesn’t have a start menu with settings.
I noticed it before, but now I really notice it. If something is wrong with the settings, sometimes that intro is unplayable or a less than optimal experience. So you have to try and skip, fix the issue, and then restart the game and try again. This seems to be more of a PC issue than a console issue, but even on consoles sometimes you need to adjust things like brightness or add subtitles
