So many games have like ~10-15 seconds of unskippable logos whenever you open the game and it pisses me off every single time. I don't understand why they still do this.

Unpausable and unskippable cutscenes

• Games that offer stealth as an option over combat, but have mandatory combat bosses.
• games that have excessive grinding as part of the main gameplay.
• Games where randomness is the primary factor in winning and losing.

• Games that jump straight into things without letting me see the options menu first.

• Not having the Playstation icons as a preset when I want to use my PS4 controller on PC.

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.

Any game ported to the PC needs to recognize controllers that are plugged in after launch and need to have a "quit to desktop" option.

I have many pet peeves when it comes to games, but the biggest that I can think of off the top of my head is the boss fights in games that don't let you use the weapons & skills/techniques that you'd used to get to that point. It just pisses me off when they let you develop a character with particular skills and weapons only to force a particular combat style that's contrary to what you'd used up till that point.

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.

Internet for single player.

I love Hitman, but the need to be connected to a server just to play rubs me the wrong way.

Single saves. Me and husband have one computer (we're broke?) and too many games have a single save. So we can't play that game trading off cause there's only one save. Like Baldur's Gate 3? Amazing. Billion saves, hell a billion for each character even. Heaven's Vault? Wild Bastards? One save. Guh.

Any game that makes me hold a button for a simple interaction. Bonus points if it has some kind of "progress bar" to show just how much longer you need to hold that button down.

Why did I need to hold X/whatever just to press the thing that opens the door? Why did I have to hold that button down for a grand total of 4 seconds before you actually did your little interaction animation? Why couldn't it just be a button press?

Part of me kinda blames Halo, as that's the first game I can remember where it was "hold button to interact;" except in every Halo game up until 4, it was only slightly longer than a normal button press so it was still incredibly quick.

ETA: I hate the extra stuff in Mafia 3 for exactly this reason, which kind of ties into what I said above: it doesn't respect my, the player's, time. That stupid "lockpicking" mini game where you break into those junction boxes? Why the hell do I have to wait for the bars to line up before I can break the lock?

And then getting in and out of vehicles plays an animation that takes way too long imo. Which sucks because a lot of the other collectibles are spread out around the map in such a way that it makes it too long to go around on foot gathering them, but it's also annoying to try to get them with a vehicle because then you need to deal with the animation and then having to run around and grab the damn thing.

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”?

Combat system that is advertised as skill based but you find out it's actually damage based and randomized.

Doing really well and winning the impossible mission because you spent time and effort leveling up and honing your skill to defeat a boss or level that you know is going to be difficult. Only for you to fail the mission and get reset or perma death because the plot demanded it.

No controller support on PC

Mobile games with fake game play advertising and demos. In game banner ads or forced ads.

• 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.

• 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?

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?!

Getting lost. I like exploring until I'm done exploring, and then I have a low tolerance for wandering aimlessly. I don't need an indicator and a map to tell me where to go, but I appreciate a sign post or NPC to nudge me in the right direction if I need it. Sometimes level/world design does not help in areas that look samey, so landmarks or some sort of unique feature are appreciated.

Games that load your audio settings only after you enter the main menu.

Thanks for destroying my ear drums, Dark Souls.

These days I think my biggest gripe about games is those which through intentional design decisions either massively disrespect the player's time, intelligence, or most often both. I'm looking very hard in Nintendo's direction, here. Miyamoto says: If the player is not locked into a succession of inescapable and slowly plodding text boxes where they're offered neither choices nor agency, it must mean they're not sufficiently engaged!

This was marginally acceptable when we were twelve years old and had all day to sit in front of the video game console, and arguably nobody knew any better. But now gamers are adults. We have jobs and chores to do and some of us have kids, and most people have only a very limited slice of time left in the day for gaming. That time should be spent actually playing the game, not waiting for your game to get out of the way of its own damn self.

But games are now going in the wrong direction, to ever greater heights of trying to manipulate players in to make the fucking thing their full time job, either due to incompetence (in single player/traditional console games) or greed (in online/live service games).

So. Also cutscenes you can't skip even after you've already seen them (this includes all the dumbass logos before the game actually starts), dialog boxes you can't skip after you've seen them the first time as well, doubly so if you can't press some button to cause them to skip their typing animation and simply display in full. Extra quadruple especially if you were too cheap to have your game voice acted — yes, Nintendo, that means you again, see me after class — because then you didn't even have the excuse of trying to keep the text synchronized to the voice lines.

I'm a sight reader. I assure you, I can read your text as fast as you can put it on the screen. That's probably why I write so many words. You don't need to slowly type it out one character at a time with little scritchy bleepy bloop noises. If other people need that for accessibility purposes, fine. But let me turn it off. And if you are going to insist on forcing me to pause for several seconds at the end of each paragraph before the prompt appears and allows me to press A to receive the next text box, I'm afraid I'm going to have to hunt you down and slap clean out of your chair with this here rubber chicken.

This explicitly also includes games which force the player to grind for some critical resource or progression or need some absurd amount of in-game currency to do anything, and are clearly designed around the grinding being the point. I already have that. It's called a job. If the grind can be conveniently eliminated by paying a microtransaction; in that case your game just got uninstalled. I'm also including stuff like, "You need this item to access this content, but it randomly drops and too bad for you that you need ten of them and it's a 1/1,000 chance. Go kill more spiders. No, not those spiders. Only these specific spiders, which spawn in this specific area, but only with a 1/50 chance. The other spiders that spawn here are the wrong type."

No Man's Sky in particular is deeply guilty of this, forcing you to go to specific planets in specific types of systems which you often have no way of filtering or searching for to look for specific objects which may drop specific materials which you are required to have multiple of to build some object for your base/ship/suit/whatever. Let me just say, I'm glad that the item duplication bug in that one remains unpatched.

Games which force you to stop progression for a completely arbitrary reason, and for no other purpose than to be annoying. One example I can name off the top of my head here is Spiritfarer. This is a game that, by and large, revolves around doing menial chores to cater hand-and-foot to ungrateful people, all of which require engaging in some manner of real-time minigame. You do this while scooting all around the world to visit areas you need to be physically present in to trigger events in which you can gather required resources. Your boat sails itself once you plot a route, leaving you free to engage in said minigames (with varying levels of tedium) while it steams away in the background. The game has a day and night cycle. Your boat stops moving at night. You have to run all the way down the length of your boat (which gets progressively larger as you play) to go to bed in the cabin at the rear, whereupon the smarmy going-to-bed jingle can't be skipped, wait for the fade to black, and then run back to where you were to pick up what you were doing before you were interrupted for absolutely no compelling gameplay reason. Fuck you very much.

The latter complaint also includes games which insist on stopping the action dead incessantly to pop up a message box and have your mission control fairy tutorialize at you in a condescending and unskippable manner. Especially if it's not on your first playthrough. Frankly, if you can't figure out a way to teach your game's most basic mechanics to the player naturally and have to resort to unskippable popup nagging, you suck and you need to find a new career. Game development obviously isn't for you.

You should play Policenauts. Its a visual novel adventure game from Hideo Kojimas early days in 1994-1996 following a private eye investigating a disappearance on a space station.

When you load a save file, the game gives you a summary screen of the events in the game that have happened so far (at least it does in the SEGA Saturn version that I played). Its the first instance I recall of this happening in video games, and I do wish it could return in more games. Its possible that other games had this before, but if there was a game that did, I dont know it or remember it.

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.

One of the best examples of a game that did it right was Heaven's Vault. The game was decent/mediocre (imo) but every time I opened it it summarized what I did last time and it had awesome timeline history

In Stardew valley no matter what you had done its so easy to just start doing something you like and the game smoothes you in. Its plot has zero time limits after all

Forgot to add my pet peeve: non adjustable time/turn/action/decision limits in single player games. I hate when I have to play a game with 'perfect knowledge'/wiki to get desirable outcome because I wanted to schmuck around trying things instead of focusing the main plot/whatever the game wanted me to do. Games like Homeworld, FTL, Phoenix Point and some CRPGs I made an error early into the game and instead of giving me a way to correct my mistake the game just became unwinnable at the end. "I have to live with the consequences of my actions." Some people love that but for me it ruins the feeling. Games aren't real life. I just spent 10+ hours and I can't continue anymore? Sucks.

Broadly, where the optimal path is the boring or tedious path.

Imagine an action game where you fight monsters and get coins for defeating them. Coins can be exchanged to buy new moves, advance the plot, and so on. Basic game loop.

Now imagine that you get triple coins if you wear the red shirt when fighting red monsters. Every time you see a red monster, you could go into the menu, into equipment, into body armor, swap on the red shirt, exit all the menus, and kill the monster. Then repeat all that for blue shirt and blue monsters.

This is a made up example but some games do shit like that, where you have to do something tedious for a big payoff.

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.

Soloable games that are balanced for multiplayer. It almost always means that basic tasks take ten to a hundred times the resources they should, and arbitrary timers are added to crafting and upgrading to slow down progression.

It's the bane of survival crafting games especially.

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.

I really hate the trope of having a mission around the 50-75% mark where you are stripped of all your gear and unlocked abilities. I know it must be popular because it keeps popping up in games but I just don't enjoy it personally.

In 3rd-person games with a free moving camera, pressing the joystick not repositioning the camera behind my character. It's so annoying in action games to have to manually reposition the camera while 5 enemies are happy to attack you from off screen.

My biggest pet peeve are collectables in games not primarily about exploration. I guess it can be implemented in a fun way, but I hate backtracking or not being sure I can continue without looking in every corner in a segment of a level. Replayed Mario Galaxy and it was pleasantly surprised being able to play it in your own way.

~I am aware that nothing is stopping me to do so, even with collectables. Unfortunately I hate half progress bars just as much TT.~

It's rare, but putting cooldowns on basic moves.

I've been playing V Rising lately and it does this weird thing where dodging and blocking are equippable spells with (usually) 8-second cooldowns. In return they also get powerful side effects, but I'd rather have a normal dodge or block button I can use at will than have them relegated to yet another move I use whenever I notice the cooldown has expired.

It doesn't help that your basic movement speed is glacial. Winning boss fights come down more to your character's stats than actual player skill since you can only dodge a few times a minute and bosses love throwing out a half dozen AOEs every few seconds, turning them into DPS races.

Games that lack a checkpoint between inordinate amounts of bullshit and a boss fight where you're highly likely to die: It's annoying as hell.