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Videogame complaints that never made sense to you

sn0man

Member
“Physical games need to die. Get over it, digital is the best.”

I’m not here telling you not to get digital games. I’m not here telling you to stop playing online only games.

why you gotta yell at me if I want to own a copy of a game that will work as long as I take care of my stuff? It’s my choice.
 
Also... This game is not respecting my time. I can't even... Don't fucking play it then.

OMG... "respecting my time" is one of those dumb af things you only hear from gamers. You never hear that phrase when describing other forms of media. Like how dumb would you sound if you said a movie didnt respect your time lol.
 

brian0057

Banned
User Interface (UI) (various games) - Why do people always complain about UI's? Especially in open world games? Apparently having a health bar or a miinimap on some part of the screen ruin the immersion into the world. It's a fucking videogame. You're not playing a movie, and the stuff onscreen is supposed to aid the player, especially minimaps, which I find invaluable in navigating huge open worlds.

It's gotten to a point where people were giving praise to the recent Ghost of Tsushima for not having a minimap and instead using the wind to guide you. While I love that game to bits, if it had a minimap I wouldn't have complained.

Minimaps remove player agency.
Why bother exploring when you can just look at the corner of the screen and see what's ahead. Even more so if it shows markers.

You stop paying attention to the beautiful world the developers crafted to just "play the minimap" instead.

If you can't move about in a massive open world without it, then it's a badly designed world "cough" Witcher 3 "cough".

Points of Interest (open world games) - So opening up a game world's map and seeing all those question marks is enough to make people groan. Why? Much of that stuff is optional anyway and as long as it's not tied to the game's progression you can choose to ignore it. I remember finishing the The Witcher 3's main story without having to finish most of the POIs in Skellige.

See above.
Makes exploration meaningless.
If you're just gonna dump hundreds of markers on the map, showing the player all the things you can do in it.
Why should anyone bother to explore if there's nothing to discover.
See also: literally any Ubisoft open world game.

Walking ang talking sections (various games) - Why do people complain about sections where your character walks and talks with another NPC? If the game's relaying information to the player whilst also exploring the area, how is that a bad thing? None of the games I've played had particularly long sections of this to be irritating to me.

It's not as interactive as full blown gameplay nor as engaging as a cutscene.
It's the worst of both worlds.

I love Human Revolution and Mankind Divided but the slow walking segment at the begining of both games drive me up the fucking wall. Either give me the info through gameplay or through a cutscene.
This half-assed shit is annoying and needs to die. Especially when you die and have to repeat it. And unlike a cutscene, you can't skip it.

It the illusion of control.
At least the Half-Life tram sequence was tematically and mechanically cosistent.
 

brian0057

Banned
People bitching and moaning about stories.
Bitch, it's a videogame. If I want a good story, I'll go read a book or watch a movie/TV show.

I don't care if the ending to Mankind Divided is "sub par". It's a masteful cyberpunk RPG with superb level design and an abundance of choice.

John Carmack was correct when he compared games to porn.
The story is expected to be there, but it's not that important.
 
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Saber

Member
"I want more realism"

Lol do you people play games for realism? The door is next to you, go out and explore the real world if you want more realism that your life already gives you.

"This female character is too sexy"

While proceeds to drow over every almost naked buff dudes and back street boy looking type of characters, using "male fantasy" retarded excuse.

"It's too difficult. I demand this game to be more easier"

Followed by generic type of excuses like "I don't have time".
 
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Elcid

Banned
GaaS as a model. Why the fuck would I not want more content given over time instead of having to wait 5 years for a sequel?
 

StormCell

Member
If you've ever played an RTS you know artificial dificulty is real.

The AI is omniscient, if you build an unit it will build a counter, it has unlimited resources, knows where you are at all times, etc etc.

I hadn't even considered this. I'm reminded of the years when my dad was absolutely hooked on Madden football. He would adjust the CPU skill to its maximum, which apparently meant CPU defenders could deflect or pick off passes they were 5 yards away from and their runners would require at least 2 defenders to bring them down. lol

The honest expectation would have been for the CPU to call better plays, but nah.

Oh, and Civilization games are/were the same way. On the highest difficulty setting, they advance faster than is realistically possible and spawn units from nothing. Yes, it's more difficult to beat them, but it's not what was expected.
 
GaaS as a model. Why the fuck would I not want more content given over time instead of having to wait 5 years for a sequel?
GaaS has been done like shit by just about everyone that's done it. The only non-scummy GaaS devs I can think of off the top of my head are Digital Extremes with Warframe and HelloGames with No Man's Sky, and you can't even spend extra money in NMS if you wanted to.
 
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Belmonte

Member
This one strikes a bit of a nerve for me. I don't know if this counts as 'artificial difficulty' or just a 'difficulty spike', but I've always hated that fight with the Omega Pirate in Metroid Prime. Battling him is not the problem. It's the waves of beam pirates that keep interfering in the boss fight. I loath any time a game throws fodder into the mix that you either have to take time to clear or suck it up and take it from behind while you try to kill off the boss quickly.

I generally hate when games have difficulty spikes, though.

I don't remember Omega Pirate. Not sure if I encounter him since I lost my Metroid Prime save and could not finish unfortunately but seems like a difficult spike for me!

If you've ever played an RTS you know artificial dificulty is real.

The AI is omniscient, if you build an unit it will build a counter, it has unlimited resources, knows where you are at all times, etc etc.

It isn't artificial. At least, not more artificial than any other game.

If an RTS has omniscient AI with unlimited resources and the devs objective was to emulate a human player, than they did a bad job. The challenge per se is very real though.

I call unfun difficulty, bad for multiplayer training since the computer does not follow human rules. But a well made AI is as artificial as a bad one.

Enemies having bullshit hitboxes for their moves, enemies trapassing walls with their weapons when you feel safe (because you know, you are behind a fucking wall\obstacle), shitty camera or shitty lock on, shitty cover system or shitty aim system and many many other are real and there is no other term to describe them if not artificial difficulty created by incompetence or lack of money\time\betatesting.

And i'm usually the guy who say "shit is too easy"...

My point is that the term suggests that well made difficulty is natural. As everyone knows, everything is a designer's choice.

The term I would use to describe what you wrote are bugs and unfun or poorly made difficulty.

Someone can think I'm over reacting because of semantics, and fair enough. But I don't like the term because it is used to downplay many interesting mechanics, usually used in challenging games.

I know it wasn't your point but just to illustrate: even enemies trespassing walls could be interesting if the devs knows what they are doing like in Devil May Cry Scissor Demons.
 

sainraja

Member
I think that whole thing started because a boss says it in uncharted 2 and it made people think. They reflected and thought well yeah he's a mass murderer.


We have to remember that Nathan Drake almost lost Elena because of him and due to that he was pretty close to wanting to kill him and if in this instance he had gone through with it, it could be categorized as murder since he was looking for revenge; everything else happened due to the situation Drake found himself in. I think most of it can be explained, I am sure there are some oversights but I don't like how people just use it as a quick way to brush off the games and the associated story.
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
I don't remember Omega Pirate. Not sure if I encounter him since I lost my Metroid Prime save and could not finish unfortunately but seems like a difficult spike for me!



It isn't artificial. At least, not more artificial than any other game.

If an RTS has omniscient AI with unlimited resources and the devs objective was to emulate a human player, than they did a bad job. The challenge per se is very real though.

I call unfun difficulty, bad for multiplayer training since the computer does not follow human rules. But a well made AI is as artificial as a bad one.



My point is that the term suggests that well made difficulty is natural. As everyone knows, everything is a designer's choice.

The term I would use to describe what you wrote are bugs and unfun or poorly made difficulty.

Someone can think I'm over reacting because of semantics, and fair enough. But I don't like the term because it is used to downplay many interesting mechanics, usually used in challenging games.

I know it wasn't your point but just to illustrate: even enemies trespassing walls could be interesting if the devs knows what they are doing like in Devil May Cry Scissor Demons.
Dude like i said, i'm usually the guy who think that a lot of games are easy, do you think that i can be against what you say? cmon.

People like to whine and then call other people elitist in a fucking hardcore videogame forum...
if you have the skill of a 5 years old what the fuck are you doing here discussing difficulty in games?

When a game is too difficult i just accept that i'm bad at it.

but when it comes to all my examples, calling out devs for their poor job is absolutely ok in my book.

Sometimes from softare games have a lot of these problems even if fanboys says gitgud...no, i'm not gonna gitgud when the camera is absolute trash and enemies hit me behind a damn wall of concrete.

this is quintessentials artificial difficulty at work.

Scissors demons in dmc are made to trapass walls on purpose and i love that mechanic, but it's different from what i'm saying.
 
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TheInfamousKira

Reseterror Resettler
Anytime someone says something along the lines of "It's a good game, but not a good [insert IP] game," as if they're the arbiters of nomenclature and all aspects of game design must be discussed in a committee and then passed directly to their desk so they can either nod approvingly or veto the title. Like come the fuck on.

Final Fantasy and Resident Evil seem to be the biggest attractor of this tired rhetoric. You fell in love with the franchise from the first couple of entries, we get it. You're legit, 2 kool 4 skewl. Stagnant product is one of the three points to the unholy triangle named "Death of Creativity," along with censorship and some other shit that I haven't thought about this analogy enough to pin point.

The people who built a franchise from the ground up and turned it into a household name get to decide if it's a [insert IP] game, not Tr0llFuck3r69.
 

sainraja

Member
Minimaps remove player agency.
Why bother exploring when you can just look at the corner of the screen and see what's ahead. Even more so if it shows markers.

You stop paying attention to the beautiful world the developers crafted to just "play the minimap" instead.

If you can't move about in a massive open world without it, then it's a badly designed world "cough" Witcher 3 "cough".



See above.
Makes exploration meaningless.
If you're just gonna dump hundreds of markers on the map, showing the player all the things you can do in it.
Why should anyone bother to explore if there's nothing to discover.
See also: literally any Ubisoft open world game.



It's not as interactive as full blown gameplay nor as engaging as a cutscene.
It's the worst of both worlds.

I love Human Revolution and Mankind Divided but the slow walking segment at the begining of both games drive me up the fucking wall. Either give me the info through gameplay or through a cutscene.
This half-assed shit is annoying and needs to die. Especially when you die and have to repeat it. And unlike a cutscene, you can't skip it.

It the illusion of control.
At least the Half-Life tram sequence was tematically and mechanically cosistent.

I've heard this kind of criticism before and the idea that kept coming to my mind was, how can developers give players the ability to mark up the map on their own as they discover points of interests along their journey? (add city names they see on signs, people they meet, areas they find interesting). I know games allow us to add a marker, but can I don't think any game allows us to add a marker and also add areas on the map that we identify ourselves.

I am actually surprised no game does this (or there might be one that does and I just haven't played it).
 

Happosai

Hold onto your panties
People who complain about open world games and still buy them...then complain more. I've heard this for BotW and MGSV: The Phantom Pain. I've always enjoyed open worlds and some of my favorite games are open world. The complaint by some seems to be that the games are too long from start to finish. Which begs the question again: Why do they buy them if you can easily find this info prior to buying the game?
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
People bitching and moaning about stories.
Bitch, it's a videogame. If I want a good story, I'll go read a book or watch a movie/TV show.

I don't care if the ending to Mankind Divided is "sub par". It's a masteful cyberpunk RPG with superb level design and an abundance of choice.

John Carmack was correct when he compared games to porn.
The story is expected to be there, but it's not that important.
Well depends, there are games where the story is kinda of a big part so if it's bad and full of holes it is a legit complaint.

nowadays a lot of games are heavy story driven, even open world games and if devs pump the story in their trailers, people start to have some expectations, especially when you have hours and hours of cutscenes.
 

RedVIper

Banned
If an RTS has omniscient AI with unlimited resources and the devs objective was to emulate a human player, than they did a bad job. The challenge per se is very real though.

I call unfun difficulty, bad for multiplayer training since the computer does not follow human rules. But a well made AI is as artificial as a bad one.

Then you're just arguing semantics and this discussion is pointless.

Artificial can mean something like insincere, false. The difficulty feels artificial because the game isn't playing by the same rules that I am.

You're just arguing the definition of the word, not it's usage.
 
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GymWolf

Gold Member
People who complain about open world games and still buy them...then complain more. I've heard this for BotW and MGSV: The Phantom Pain. I've always enjoyed open worlds and some of my favorite games are open world. The complaint by some seems to be that the games are too long from start to finish. Which begs the question again: Why do they buy them if you can easily find this info prior to buying the game?
I'm with you but both mgs5 and botw were criticized because they were pretty barren and lifeless (on top of some other complaints) not much for their longevity.
I mean you can fight the zelda final boss almost immediately...
 
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Happosai

Hold onto your panties
I'm with you but both mgs5 and botw were criticized because they were pretty barren and lifeless (on top of some other complaints) not much for their longevity.
I mean you can fight the zelda final boss almost immediately...
Yeah, that could be an issue. I think the seemingly infinite side missions in MGSV got annoying but overall I still liked the games. I have heard people complain about open world in games like Shadow of the Colossus...that I don't get.
 

#Phonepunk#

Banned
Oh yeah I hate the “barren” complaints in MGSV. Complete horseshit. You were never a minute’s run from an enemy camp. There was constantly stuff to pick up and loot from the environment. On top of that you are in a fucking war zone in the deserts of Afghanistan. I saw people whining that there were no towns and NoCs and I was like, yeah, they all cleared out when the Russian military took over.

Because this is a war zone? They are in a desert? In the middle of a war? You expect a bunch of fun shit to do??? What mini games do you think you could play in a desert?

Worst were complaints about the helicopter animation, like you can’t sit through a technically stunning 30 second clip of your Legendary Mercenary flying into a war zone in his own private heli. 30 seconds is just too long of a wait for you. Like ffs if people aren’t given someone to shoot every 10 seconds their brains turn to mush. People have no attention spans.
 
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Happosai

Hold onto your panties
Oh yeah I hate the “barren” complaints in MGSV. Complete horseshit. You were never a minute’s run from an enemy camp. There was constantly stuff to pick up and loot from the environment. On top of that you are in a fucking war zone in the deserts of Afghanistan. I saw people whining that there were no towns and NoCs and I was like, yeah, they all cleared out when the Russian military took over.

Because this is a war zone? They are in a desert? In the middle of a war? You expect a bunch of fun shit to do??? What mini games do you think you could play in a desert?

Worst were complaints about the helicopter animation, like you can’t sit through a technically stunning 30 second clip of your Legendary Mercenary flying into a war zone in his own private heli. 30 seconds is just too long of a wait for you. Like ffs if people aren’t given someone to shoot every 10 seconds their brains turn to mush. People have no attention spans.
You forgot the complaint: it's not as good as MGS 1-4. They ruined Metal Gear is one I hear a lot, too. I still see a lot of life in the game. I want to hear someone complain his it wasn't as good as Metal Gear 1987. Those people exist.
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
Oh yeah I hate the “barren” complaints in MGSV. Complete horseshit. You were never a minute’s run from an enemy camp. There was constantly stuff to pick up and loot from the environment. On top of that you are in a fucking war zone in the deserts of Afghanistan. I saw people whining that there were no towns and NoCs and I was like, yeah, they all cleared out when the Russian military took over.

Because this is a war zone? They are in a desert? In the middle of a war? You expect a bunch of fun shit to do??? What mini games do you think you could play in a desert?

Worst were complaints about the helicopter animation, like you can’t sit through a technically stunning 30 second clip of your Legendary Mercenary flying into a war zone in his own private heli. 30 seconds is just too long of a wait for you. Like ffs if people aren’t given someone to shoot every 10 seconds their brains turn to mush. People have no attention spans.
I didn't even played the game as an open world game, for me it was just a series of sandbox areas.
If you go with that mentality the world being barren is not a big problem.
 

Happosai

Hold onto your panties
Some people bought SOTC thinking it was a checklist openworld.
The original PS2 manual would have given away a lot about SOTC. Sony didn't explain very much and they didn't have to back then; the idea was for it to be an exploration you figure out without being given everything in context. It worked and is still popular.
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
The original PS2 manual would have given away a lot about SOTC. Sony didn't explain very much and they didn't have to back then; the idea was for it to be an exploration you figure out without being given everything in context. It worked and is still popular.
Sometimes people buy games because the cover looks good, what can i say? :lollipop_squinting:
 
A demand for open difficulty settings or easier difficulty settings.

Back in my day we called that get more fucking quarters. Forgive me while I go yell at clouds and tell those covid carrying kids to get off my lawn.
 
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Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
Not a complaint about games, but game reviews. "I don't know what fun means." Yes, you know what fun means, you're just being an obtuse asshole and making up something to complain about. Stop it.
 

imbrock

Banned
People complaining about tropes or ideas in games that they disagree with. Thats art, artists make it to get reactions, they make it more for themselves as a statement than for you as a product. People need to stop acting like the whole world / industry revolves around them.
 

TheContact

Member
Grinding. It’s basically a mechanic of rpgs and you don’t always have to do it, but it gives you options as to how easy or hard you want the experience to be.
 

imbrock

Banned
Grinding. It’s basically a mechanic of rpgs and you don’t always have to do it, but it gives you options as to how easy or hard you want the experience to be.

Its also a staple of online games, and games with microtransactions. Grinding used to be kind of cool in Diablo 2 and other early RPG's but at this point its become a tool to pry money out of peoples wallets and in that respect I hate it. That being said its totally fine as a mechanic in pokemon or other levels based RPGs.
 

Zog

Banned
I don't get people why complain about GAAS and "always online". Games that are living, breathing and constantly evolving are interesting and have longevity and dynamic feedback. I'm not even bothered by MTX.

What GAAS games will be playable in 35 years?
 

Arachnid

Member
Those who complain about third person because they believe first person is more immersive (not counting VR, of course). Early Silent Hill games and Bloodborne immersed me just as much if not more so than any first person game I've played. Immersion comes down to atmosphere and storytelling more than anything.

If anything, I've always felt a weird disconnect to first person. The main argument for it is that the perspective makes you feel like you're looking through your own eyes, but that's not true in my experience. If anything, it takes me out of it because of how much it doesn't line up with normal FOV and movement. Limbs never look right, head bouncing always comes off as weirdly rhythmic and exact, and there is no way to simulate peripherals.

The exception to this is of course VR, which uses your own head movement and somewhat brings peripherals in (peripherals come more into play when you're actually turning your head and looking around)..
 

Zog

Banned
Hate the term "artificial difficulty".

Most of the time it just means "I can't pass this section so the game must be cheating".The very few times which the term could have a point, it doesn't. There is nothing "natural" in a game.

Ever play a Mario Kart game and watch your item go right through the racer you shot it at? Ever see a racer you knock out recover much quicker than you could in the same situation? Sometimes games do cheat.
 
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Zog

Banned
OMG... "respecting my time" is one of those dumb af things you only hear from gamers. You never hear that phrase when describing other forms of media. Like how dumb would you sound if you said a movie didnt respect your time lol.
People say 'That's 2 hours I won't get back' all the time.
 

Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
"Games as a service and F2P are bad" is just code for "I prefer single player games and am afraid of the wave."
 

Zog

Banned
"Games as a service and F2P are bad" is just code for "I prefer single player games and am afraid of the wave."
If you aren't afraid of what the game industry is becoming then you aren't paying attention. They want you to own nothing, to stop playing a game when they stop supporting it and then repurchase the same game a few years later at full price.

People who complain about open world games and still buy them...then complain more. I've heard this for BotW and MGSV: The Phantom Pain. I've always enjoyed open worlds and some of my favorite games are open world. The complaint by some seems to be that the games are too long from start to finish. Which begs the question again: Why do they buy them if you can easily find this info prior to buying the game?

I don't think I have ever heard that specific complaint in regards to open world games. Usually people complain about large but empty worlds.
 
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