10 incredibly minor things in games that piss us off

13.01.2023 0 By admin

[Falcon] No game is perfect.

There’s always something that is annoying.

Like the weapon durability in Breath of the Wild,the long grind to the true ending in Arkham Knight.

And sometimes you just
gotta sweat the small stuff.

Hi folks, it’s Falcon.
And today on Gameranx,

10 incredibly minor things
in games that piss us off.

Starting off with number 10,

it’s connecting online
in single-player games.

Like the convenience of the
internet has a downside.

More and more games out
there want you to connect

to the internet while you play.

But we’re not talking
about requirements here,

we’re more talking about
the minor annoyances.

Like waiting for games to
connect to the internet

when you are just going
to play single-player.

And yes, this is a situation
where, for the most part,

the actual reason it’s connected
to the internet, allegedly,

is to make saving easier
and stuff like that,

make it so you don’t lose
your game at any point.

But they’re also kind of making sure

you’re not pirating the game
or cheating in some way.

I mean, it’s less that way
on consoles, but still.

I mean the Division series,

and another notorious one
was Watch Dogs: Legion.

These were Ubisoft games,
that’s the common feature here.

But when Watch Dogs: Legion came out,

it didn’t even have
online features at all.

It just connected to the
internet for whatever reason

and well, that’s totally unnecessary.

These games were playable
offline just fine.

So why not not screw it up?

It might sound like a minor gripe,

but that five to 20 seconds

of waiting can really
seem like a long time.

At number nine, waiting
around to talk to an NPC.

Speaking of waiting,

this is another pretty constant annoyance

that you see in a lot of Bethesda RPGs,

Fallout 3 and 4, and
even way back to Skyrim.

They all have NPCs that follow schedules

in their day-to-day lives.

Like at night, they go to bed.

During the day, they go to their day job.

It’s cool, like when you think about it.

And let’s say you’re a thief,

it gives you some really good options

to mess around with these people.

Like you can sneak in during
the day to rob them blind,

or drink their blood at night
because you’re a vampire

and you need their blood at night.

Don’t do it during the
day, they’re at their job.

But there’s a downside.

Sometimes they wander around,
just kind of doing whatever

and you need to talk to
them for whatever reason,

be it a mission,

or they have something
that you need, whatever.

And sometimes you’re just like having

to constantly press the wait button,

meaning jumping ahead an hour in time

because that NPC just is not showing up.

Like they’re off somewhere frolicking

in a field or something. I
don’t know. It’s annoying.

And at number eight, having to spend money

or use items to save.

I don’t know why this was something

that people thought was important.

Like it’s not a really particularly good

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difficulty adjustment.

And at no point has it
ever really made any sense

for there not to be unlimited saves

or at least the ability to save
an unlimited number of times

within a limited number of slots.

And some developers clearly view us

as spoiled brats for this reason.

Like a lot of games from
the Resident Evil series,

for instance, require ink ribbons to save

and you only find a
limited amount of those

during the course of the game.

And then there’s games
like Donkey Kong Country

where you actually have
to pay gold coins to save.

That means you have to go
out and collect gold coins

and pay to save the game.

Thankfully, this hasn’t really ever been

like a microtransaction-oriented thing

because I think that would
make people pretty mad.

But the practice hasn’t exactly gone away.

The Resident Evil 2
remake has a classic mode

that reintroduces ink ribbons

and they are, again, a limited resource.

Another hardcore game
from not that long ago,

Kingdom Come: Deliverance
keeps this, well,

fairly annoying tradition alive.

When that game released,
in order to save anywhere,

you had to drink saviour schnapps,

which was obviously
something you had to acquire.

And in a game that’s as
hardcore as Kingdom Come,

you kind of want to be able
to save as often as possible.

At number seven is any
RPG with a luck stat.

Out of all the stats,
luck is the least defined.

Will it increase your
chances of dodging attacks?

Will it improve your critical hits?

Will it cause more items to
drop from loot containers?

Or will it do basically nothing?

The luck stat always pisses us off

just because it’s the one

we really don’t know what to do with.

Like luck appears years
in games like Wasteland 3.

But thankfully that gives you
special perks as you level up,

explaining exactly what
benefits you’ll get from luck.

But other games, like Demon Souls,

aren’t really exactly forthcoming.

And then there’s a game,

you go back a little ways, to Morrowind,

and it has luck, but it’s
such an obscure thing.

Most players have no idea
how to level a stat up,

what it does, how to practice it.

I don’t know, and it pisses me off.

At number six is loading
after swapping characters.

Here’s an annoyance that,
I think for the most part,

is slowly going to be phased
out thanks to SSD drives.

Like it’s becoming pretty
instantaneous on consoles.

So the long load time might
be a thing of the past,

but it’s still really annoys us

whenever it appears in some games.

Like go back to Assassin’s
Creed Odyssey and Origins,

they include this eagle companion

and if he strays too far away from you,

you have to settle in for some loading

when you swap back to the
assassin, which feels dumb.

It feels like there’s gotta
be some way to avoid that.

The same problem persisted in another game

not long ago in Watch Dogs: Legion,

which is a game that is basically
about swapping characters.

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Even games like Grand Theft
Auto 5 have some issues

with character swapping.

Instead of driving around

in tricked out super cars you’ve unlocked,

they appear in crappy basic models.

And if we’re going really far back,

the few seconds it
takes to swap characters

in Castlevania 3 is fairly
nerve-racking actually.

At number five is hidden loading screens.

The era of slow walking
while talking on the radio

is hopefully almost over with,

like what I said earlier, the SSD drives.

But this was a widespread
phenomenon that’s mostly due

to the slow loading of Unreal Engine 3,

the version of Unreal
that was most prominent

during the PS3 and Xbox 360 era.

Every game with this engine features tons

of very slow walking, like
opening shutters with allies

or boosting friends up over ledges,

purely to mask load times.

Like ridiculous close quarters walking,

like passing through a tiny little area

where your character turns to the side

and tiptoes basically.

Like every single Gears of War game

features some really
annoying little activities

and rip offs like 50 Cent:
Blood on the Sand also do that.

The original Mass Effect is a heavy hitter

when it comes to this.

Although they didn’t really
do anything to make it seem

like you weren’t on a loading screen.

‘Cause you would be on
these long elevator rides,

and it wouldn’t say “Loading.”

But like you would say to yourself,

“It’s loading in this elevator,
that’s what’s going on”

Hell, even the Uncharted
games have a bunch

of slowly pushing open
doors, turning cranks,

or pausing to watch a cut scene.

I mean, I do actually
kind of like cut scenes

to mask loading time. At
least something’s happening.

And at number four,

when character customization
is super clunky.

Like I love character customization games.

I can spend hours on them,

slowly tweaking little values

until I’ve got the perfect look.

But some games make that
straight up impossible.

Games like Anthem,

which has a slew of its
own problems beyond this,

and Destiny, which is
actually a pretty good game.

Both have really bare minimum options

to make your character look unique.

Everyone really might as
well be a generic model,

once you equip gear that
covers you up anyways.

And then there’s games
that are just way too much,

like far too fiddly.

Among all of the other
problems that WWE 2K20 had,

when designing a wrestler,

no matter how many sliders you adjust,

the character pretty
much always looks bad.

Same goes for open world games,
like Fallout 3 and Oblivion.

Some sliders affect other sliders.

Like you mess with a jaw slider,

suddenly the head slider’s all wonky.

Fallout 4 at least improved
on this front a bit.

Like pretty much every character
creator that’s like this

makes you wish that they would just adapt

the Sims 4 character
creation for everything.

At number three is no crouch sneak mode.

Splinter Cell introduced the
world to the crouch walk.

It’s the default sneak mode in games,

and it took way too long for other games

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to adopt the best movement
mode in gaming history.

Like it took until Assassin’s Creed Unity

before that stealth series
touched on the crouching sneak.

And Metal Gear Solid didn’t
get crouching movement

until Peace Walker.

Before the crouch walk, you
just had a lumber around

like the world’s biggest
barely mobile secret agent.

Other games had crouch movement,

but it was basically useless.

I’m looking at you Hitman.

From Hitman 2 to Hitman: Blood Money,

your crouch is so ridiculously slow

that it’s useless for
sneaking up on an enemy.

But crouch sneaking quickly
became a staple of FPS games,

probably just that you didn’t have

to animate anything extra.

And at number two,
floaty ladders of death.

Ladders are gonna be a
problem until the end of time.

They’re getting better in games.

Like Alien: Isolation kind of lock you in

so you climb ladders safely,
but that is not every game.

Going back to Death Stranding,

ladders become breakable
under heavy weight.

Or if your placement isn’t
exactly right, they’ll just slip.

But we’re not talking about okay ladders

or ones with unique mechanics
like Death Stranding,

we’re talking about the
dark age of ladders,

like the original Half-Life, Doom 3,

and a bunch of other FPS games,

that made ladders the most
dangerous traversal method

on the planet.

Instead of climbing up and down ladders,

you float and hopefully don’t slip off.

And finally at number one,

when you can’t just restart a checkpoint.

Even awesome games have this mistake.

PlatinumGames developed
hardcore action games

that let you score every battle you’re in.

Sometimes you’ll mess up.

You want to try again for better ranking.

But Platinum makes simply
reloading checkpoints impossible

in lots their games.

You have to exit to the
main menu then continue

instead of simply reloading
from the pause screen.

Bayonetta and Wonderful 101

have this incredibly annoying oversight

because those are both awesome games.

And some of us have a sick compulsion

to earn perfect platinum rank
in every enemy encounter.

And for plenty of games,
that wouldn’t be an issue.

Nobody needs to reload saves
constantly in a Mario game.

But in Platinum games,

of course I’d like to give
those encounters a second try.

That’s all for today.

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much for watching this video.

I’m Falcon. You can follow
me on Twitter @FalconTheHero.

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