Invisible walls. And I'm not saying the ones that are like way up out of the way that you have to nearly use glitches to get to. I'm talking the "walking down a city street and then you're stopped in the middle of the road for no reason" kind. Like, you put area there that I can see, I want to go there. If you don't want me to go there at least put something there to indicate it's the edge of the map.

Games you can't pause. I love Dark Souls, but PLEASE give me a real pause button !

I'm okay with the inventory not pausing, that's part of the game design. I'm not okay with the fact I can't pause at all, so if my neighbour rings for their spare key when I'm fighting Kalameet I just have to die 🤷🏻‍♀ (true story btw)

Cutscenes that can't be paused, especially if they're longer than 10 seconds.

Do you have the slightest idea how frustrating it is to be mid-cutscene, something else requires my attention, and I cannot fucking pause it? Singlehandedly my biggest gripe with gaming.

Anything that needlessly makes me repeat content I already beat or similarly wastes my time. Some examples are:

Fixed save points in general.

Unskippable cutscenes between the last fixed save point and the boss fight.

No autosave or fixed save point after a boss fight.

Preventing me from backtracking after I stumbled into a cut scene and/or boss fight because it wasn't obvious which path led to a point of no return.

Oh, and no Play Station style controller glyphs. Come on, it's an additional set of images, now hard can it be to implement?

Logins. I hate games with accounts. Just let me play.

The fact that games act like climbing doesn't exist. You reach a path blocked by a small rock that any normally able bodied human could climb and it just pisses me off.

Like Pokémon games with a rock you could easily just walk around but noooo you gotta travel to this other town to get a special item or learn a special skill to get around this thing you could easily climb over or walk around.

Games that don't allow you to pause and skip cutscenes.

I don't want to have to miss half of the cutscenes just because someone interrupted me or the phone rang or something half way through. Alternatively, when I'm on my 23rd replay of a game, I do not want to have to sit through every cutscenes I already know by heart.

Oh, and modern games that allow manual saving at any time, not having any kind of regular auto save (looking at you here BG3).

If you're fine from a gameplay pov with having the player save whenever, then there's really no good reason whatsoever to not have one or two auto save slots that get saved every 10-20 minutes or so, at least as an option in the menu. ESPECIALLY in open world games (like BG3...) where you can easily go literal hours at a time without hitting a checkpoint save. And yes, I am still salty over learning about BG3's lack of regular auto save when I lost like 2.5 hours of progress on my first run.

Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.

Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it's 30% more gold and that's the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.

A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.

Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.

It's different if there's stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it's just jogging? Very disappointing.

Points of no return and anything else that's permanently missable. No, I am not doing a second playthrough of a 100 hour JRPG.

Unrealistic loot.

Like when you kill a wolf and get shotgun shells as loot.

But also more subtle stuff like enemies in a remote place that don't carry or have any kind of food and drink with them.

And when the enemy is clearly carrying a weapon, but it's not lootable and you get some random stuff instead.

Not being able to jump in a first person game.

spongy bosses don't always mean they're challenging. I can't count how many times I've fought a boss who isn't hard or interesting but just wastes time cause they have a ton of health.

mechanics matter.

My particularly niche gripe is bad dialogue tree options. There are so many games where the mechanism is selecting an option and watching it play out, but so many of them are shit when it comes to the difference between what you see as the option and what actually is said/done. Heavy Rain did it. 'What should the character say next? Unreadable zalgotext option A, or unreadable zalgotext option B?' Or ones where the options on screen are 'A) I thoroughly agree. B) I thoroughly disagree. or C) What?' but selecting C means the character isn't just asking for clarification because 'What?' actually points at the voiceline, 'What the fuck are you talking about, you piece of inhuman filth? I bet your a murdering rapist.' If I can't have some idea of what selecting an option will do, I'm not actually playing a game at that point. I might as well be trying to play Mario with a controller that remaps itself randomly.

Obligatory tutorials. Make it a choice.

QTE "final bosses". Seemed to be a much bigger problem in the PS3/360 era.

"Open world" or "Sandbox" games that don't care about your progress, where it's painfully obvious that your actions don't matter at all. Yes, this is mostly about Starfield

Games where you can win by a landslide but the computer/story goes "Hah, you were just lucky!"

I'm left-handed. Key rebinding has gotten better in some ways throughout the evolution of gaming, but it has recently regressed in the past few years.

I make custom layouts for every game I play. IJKL to move, Semicolon to sprint, Quote to crouch, M to interact, etc. I find many games where "I" is hard-bound to inventory, some bindings overlap keys I've bound with no way of fixing without going outside the game, some keys are unable to rebound entirely in-game, some keybindings menus require jank to actually work, some keybindings menus completely glitch out as I change entries, some games require .ini edits, some keys seem like they are working fine rebound, but completely bug out in unique ways, some games allow keys to be bound with modifiers (e.g. Shift + Mouse Button) and some don't, and so forth.

It's very frustrating. I can only imagine what people with physical disabilities and assistive devices deal with if it's this hard for me. I've tried using my right-hand for my mouse and WASD, but I get way too much pain doing so - even if I could properly learn to use a computer and game that way. I can't use WASD and my left-hand on the mouse as it is incredibly painful.

I just have to imagine this is all the case because QA is nonexistent and developers are overworked.

Definitely with you on controller rebinding! Now that I'm an old man I also absolutely hate how damn tiny the text is when playing games on a TV. Gamers are getting old, we don't all have young eyes or sit in front of a monitor to play games!

If the game supports voice chat in-game, then it is not ok to play background music while talking in-game. Just mute yourself and don't make us listen. It's the same as people walking around neighborhood and blasting their music from their phone as if they're the only ones with ears.

When the music doesn't stop on the Pause screen.

Alright, I'll limit it to just pet peeves.

Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don't explain enough, others treat you like you've never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it's too much of an info dump, and you're just left wondering wtf they just said. One game that I really liked how they did it was BG3. There's a tutorial, but you can also turn it off on future runs. Worst tutorial I think I've ever seen was Xenoblade 2.

Games (and really any consumable media) that just don't know when to end. There are very few games I've completed, mostly because I get bored. The game overstayed it's welcome and I'm done. The grind isn't worth the final boss fight or whatever is at the end. Generally, it's because games (especially RPGs) think grinding is a "fun" mechanic when it's more of an imbalanced game. Take, for example, Expedition 33, not once in that game do you need to run around grinding levels. You can successfully go through the entire game, only going to each stage once. Fucking fantastic. But then you have games that just went too far with things. Some games, like Skyrim, CP2077, (especially) Hogwarts Legacy, I only know the ending to those games because other people beat them. Ex33 I got 52/55 achievements (just need to win the gestral games and find whatever record I missed). I beat that game entirely in 74 hours. My first run of BG3 (53/54 achievements, only missing the bard one, because I think it's boring), first playthrough was maybe 120 hours (currently over 700 due to multiple playthroughs). Skyrim... 146 hours... 27/75 achievements. CP2077, 133 hours, 18/57 achievements. Hogwarts sits at 50 hours with 19/45 achievements (that game should be a 20-hour game at most).

Games that don't really respect your time. This one, Nintendo does a lot. Actually perfect example is Breath of the Wild. It's a giant fuck off world that's mostly empty, peppered largely with the same enemies throughout the whole thing. You have a weapon mechanic that encourages you NOT to fight (just get some good weapons and head off to exactly where you need to go). The cooking is bullshit, no recipe book, no making a bunch of something, a stupid cutscene every time. And the entire poop joke... like getting 20 for a poop joke would already be too much, but collecting 900 with (IIRC) no fucking way to track them.. Or the fact that the way Nintendo expects you to get arrows is to grind out rupees to buy them. And the exploits used to get arrows or rupees quickly, in a single player game, they actively tried to patch out. That's just one game, Nintendo does this on SO MANY GAMES, which actually pushed me to "fuck Nintendo" and I didn't buy and won't buy a Switch 2.

Some games are combos of these. One game I really like, but I always hit a wall is Satisfactory. Once I get to trains/aluminum, it's just not fun anymore for me. I work 40-80 hours a week (sometimes I work 5x12s and 8ish hours Sat/Sun)(only sometimes, usually closer to 50 hours a week)... so all the extra planning and time to making a factory... like I just don't have the fucking time. Same thing with Dune Awakening. The first zone was the best. Getting your first Orni wasn't too bad, but it was already starting to push it. Having to fucking pay taxes in a game... Oddly, it was about the time I was farming up aluminum, I quit that game too. Maybe I have a pet peeve with aluminum in video games...

when you can rebind movement keys (I'm an esdf player as opposed to wasd), but it does not rebind consistently. So a map is panned using wasd still, or menu browsing is, or even basic movement in a mini-game, or driving using a vehicle etc. It seems developers rarely really test anything but wasd...

Worst was cyberpunk, which always jettisoned me from the car in a super dramatic leap... on every right turn. XD

edit: also, when rebound keys are not represented correctly in tutorials or prompts.. ugh.

Too many games are "survival" games now which really means they will make you do a bunch of chores to get to the sub par shooter or adventure game the chores gate you from. No, I don't want to chop wood and get rope or whatever for the 50th game that never innovates on any of these mechanics to get to the "good part"

Also lots of fun games seem to be ruined because they are battle royales.

Photo modes that limit camera movement to within a tiny radius of the player character. FF7 Remake/Rebirth, and FF16, are glaring examples of this.

Or photo modes that fade out NPCs or objects when the camera gets close enough for good screenshots of them.

Just give me a boundless flying camera option and let me live with the unfinished bits if I so choose.

3D level design where you can get stuck on elements when you just want to move past them. Especially frustrating in racing games or sections where you have to move fast. Controls are just not precise enough to deal with this under stress.

Visible polygons and interactable polygons are not the same thing. Play Banjo Kazooie and Yookah Laylee (including the remake) to see the difference. The latter has you constantly bump into things because the environment is not smoothed out.

On the other hand some studios take it to the other extreme and make you walk almost on rails, childproofing every corner. A good middle ground is needed.

I add non-Steam games to Steam just so I can use Steam Input for controller rebinding

Currently, I'm replaying The Witcher 3, and the main annoyance I'm having right now is not being able to pause during timed choices (and timed choice are a whole other problem in games too).

You can pause during non-time-sensitive dialog choices, but not during timed ones. I don't know why they specifically deny pausing for those. Maybe to prevent people from pausing and thinking it out? But, some of these times sensitive choices greatly effect the story. I want to be able to think about these choices when they effect the story.

Putting too many game mechanics into a game, like fighting system, bonus crystals, combinations of stuff to upgrade other stuff, plus pets, minigames, repetable quests, party combinations, crosswords, and more, in a single player game especially.

And dark patterns of course.

Challenges that require replaying a level several times to achieve them can be very rewarding

Unless the level also comes with unskippable cut scenes or long conversations on horseback

I have two.

1. The Culture

I do not claim to be a 'gamer'. I prefer to be best described as someone who plays games, but not nearly as often as one branded a 'gamer' would play games by. But I've been partly turned off from video games because of the culture surrounding them. The streamers who play games, the RGB droolers, the tech-junkies, the whales, the hype-train types, the multi-hour essay level of delivering an opinion on a game .etc

Not to mention, all of the gamer-branded merchandise from chairs to even drinks. It just turns me off and I do not ever associate with that crowd and it's a damn shame there is so much gullibility with the culture that it is difficult to avoid.

2. Game-Padding

Side-quest after side-quest does a game not make. That kind of thing is what you'd find in an MMO that needs to find things for you to do. Not in a more constrained container of a game that has a fixed story, a fixed completion rate and everything. All it tells me is that the developers did not think of or have had any faith in what they were making.