My Pet hates in modern gaming, feel free to add yours...

spine

spine

2[H]4U
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Feb 4, 2003
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Ok, so I find myself more and more frustrated at the direction modern games have taken.

Call me 'old skool' but some of these newer gameplay dynamics don't seem to, at me at least, add to the real gaming experience of a sense of accomplishment and/or gaming experience.
So here are my current pet hates right now...



• Regenerative Health

I'm sure I'm not alone on this one. Gone are the days of tactical play; gradually learning a map for health pack locations are long gone.
"Are you shot!?!?", EASY!, just duck 'n' Cover! All will be safe in 10 seconds time. :rolleyes:


• Cover systems

Sorry, but I am more than capable of hiding and ducking behind an obvious chunk of broken wall in the face of incoming gunfire;
Nothing is more annoying than running/dodging around and then finding myself involuntarily clung to a piece of obviously insufficient debris that
the game has interpreted as 'cover' even though I can see the gunfire flying through my character's skull.


• Too F#@&ing easy

I can barely remember the last single player game that really made me stop and think.
Much as I cringe at the harrowing 'will grow hairs on your chest' 'no savegame' mentality of past games (NES/SNES era);
at least you felt a sense of achievement having completed a certain section.
Now it's all, rewards this, bling that. I don't need a medal for opening the 100th door I had to open anyway.


Anyway, these are my worst offenders. :p

I'm sure there are far worse out there, I can't be alone on this. I just want real games to make a comeback. Is that too much to ask? :D

[/GEEK RANT]
 
Regenerative Health

FOV's less than 90

CoD/MoH/BF series of games and all their clones

Killperks that give you.... more free kills

No.. scratch that, kill perks in general.
 
Quicksaves and saving in general. I'm okay with checkpoints sometimes, but I generally find a game much more interesting if there is a way to respawn with penalty (MMOs, Diablo, Minecraft, etc) or if you simply have to restart entirely (old console games, roguelikes, etc). Heck even having a limited number of "lives" is fun. It makes "easy" games a lot more difficult when the consequence for carelessness is a lot more than a 10-second loading screen as you quickload.

Quickloading also makes dice-roll mechanics pretty much useless. I'm guilty of abusing quicksaves in Oblivion to increase my alchemy harvesting yields or to escape detection, etc.
 
for debate, I love regenerative health. The advantages: no more health/armor "maintenance", no more infinite save/reloads to make sure you are strong enough for the next section, developers can now throw a LOT more enemies at you. If you enjoy shooting stuff it is a win.
 
I thought this was going to be about how your pet dog or something hates it when you give attention to games and not him.


I am mildly disappointed.
 
if you need a single player game challenge, go play the original homeworld



there is a mission where you have to break through a sphere of ion frigates... hardest mission EVER !!!!!!!!!!!!!


I failed so many times on that, but when I figured out a way through it I had such a high. (I brute forced it, created a battleship or destroyer, and a TON of healing frigates to heal it, and slowly but surely I took out the ion frigates as my capital ship tanked the ion blasts).
 
Tier systems.

A guy on ESR took my thoughts and put them to words.

In ye olde days before XboxLive fags, there was a time when all gamers played together in perfect harmony. People considered better players simply better and they learnt to adapt by either getting better or finding ways around it.

Since then, in an attempt to pander to the breed of 90s kid, tiers were introduced to stop them getting owned by better players because they're ulow consolelolfagz that think everyone is haxing just because they're better then them.

HOWEVER, upon inventing tiers, little did the scientists and mathematicians behind The Great Tier System realize that people could just make new accounts (known as alias' or 'newb accounts') and could pretend to be low skilled by loosing to Crash 153 : -2 (or recently, just putting 'Beginner' difficulty at the start screen of QuakeLive's new account), jumping into a low skill tier server, strafe jumping around the server stacking up on MH's, RA's and every quad that spawns, raping everyone in sight whilst occasionally typing "LOLUMADBRO?". This is done until they get bored of the owning tedium and leave the other lowly peasants to awkwardly walk around DM6 spamming grenade launchers.
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http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1969503
 
Gamers hating on other gamers because they play on other platforms.
 
theNoid said:
Gamers hating on other gamers because they play on other platforms.
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I like PC gaming. I like my XBox as well (errr, I liked it before it's optical drive went crazy.) People hating on XBox gamers can stick it. It's a valid platform that means no DRM nonsense. And works well on my 50" Plasma.

As for regen health..well, I won't play COD1 because it has health packs. They were cool in UT GOTY. Now they plain suck ass. I prefer regen health, and not screaming for a medic for a minute before someone scratches me and I die. Delays on regen make it fine.

Cover systems can work, and mean that there's no more "how did he AWP me? Oh, there's a TINY gap between these boxes [get awped again] dammit!" When in cover...unless flanked, you live. Cool stuff.

Easy? Find the difficulty slider. Halo Reach legendary is hard.

In summary, it's "Pet peeves" not "pet hates" and you need to stick to playing your 10 year old games.

If you had said unlocks suck, I'd agree, but you missed that one.

/Agree on FOV bullshit.
 
I've always wondered where the bar is set for everybody else in terms of "Hard" when it come to games difficulty. I'm starting a difficulty thread, my interest is piqued
 
Kahnvex said:
I've always wondered where the bar is set for everybody else in terms of "Hard" when it come to games difficulty. I'm starting a difficulty thread, my interest is piqued
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If I like a game and it wasn't that long, I'll play through it again on very hard. Love the challenge.
 
I don't mind cover systems, when they're done well. Not a huge fan of a stop n' pop style of gameplay that Gears has, but well done cover systems can work well in a game. Though I do agree about the "stuck to cover" crap. Just let me push off without having to push a button.

Regenerating health...Yeah...No. Unless the character is Wolverine* or has a damn good story reason (and "he's a genetically modified super solider" does not count as a good reason) I don't like regenerating health.

To flip you're too easy complaint around, I dislike modern "hard" games because developers have no bloody clue how to make a game hard, instead they go for cheap and frustrating. I don't mind easy games that much, as long as they're not stupidly easy. I like just playing a game and getting through it without frustration. I want to enjoy my single player experience, not fight with what the developers consider a "challenge" that turns into some cheap trick the game pulls (PS: retro games are VERY guilty of this).

*=Any super hero with regenerative capabilities as well, too many to list.
 
For single player, I'm fine with Mass Effect's regenerating shields. I'm pretty bad about loading a save, if I take 90% damage in a fight.
 
Achievements/Trophy crap. In multiplayer you got people just all for themselves or with others jerking each other off to get their achievement for bullshit.
 
I completely disagree with you OP. If a game is to easy dial up the difficulty , don't just get frustrated and hate the game. Adjustments are there for a reason.

Health pack mechanics are retarded and old hat. There is a reason they aren't in games anymore and no one is striving to bring them back. UT GOTY is the exception to that rule but seriously regen health is probably one the best ADVANCEMENTS in getting players out of the "oh man where am I going to find a health pack , if I get shot once I'll die" and allowing them to enjoy the game a solid pace.

Cover systems make lots of sense as they do in reality if you stand up and out in the open your dead in seconds. The cover system also allows developers to pump more enemies into the situation than without a cover system thus making the fire fight more intense. So this is an advancement if anything.

I think OP you might just be a older jaded gamer (no offense of course) and I understand some of your reasoning but you gotta be willing to accept shooters evolving. Funny thing about shooters is that other than a few advancements they are roughly still the same as they ever were. Many other genre's change greatly over time yet shooters mostly remain the same.
 
Walking over a magic little cube that instantly restores a specific amount of health and cures all injuries that the player finds inexplicably laying around in random corners or against walls is no more realistic than regenerative health. A realistic health model would be for medkits to only stop or slow the flow of blood from wounds, or to have no kind of in-level health regeneration at all (like the original Ghost Recon).

My pet peeve, in shooters particularly, is terrible sound effects. The COD games are the biggest offenders here - they have $200 million production budgets and yet they have guns that sound like loose change jingling around in the player's pocket. They definitely sound nothing like the real weapons they feebly try to replicate.
 
Modern warfare 2 and everything it means for the future of gaming or lack there of.

Minimal gameplay with no depth and expansion sized campaigns.

Small Max player count

No Developer support

No customization/modding.

No User administration or Dedicated servers.

No community.

$60 price point $15 Mappacks.

Future subscription based service coming.

Maybe I'm off topic but really I mean just look at the run down. Even if you think the game is fun it's just depressing how fucked we are.
 
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Multiplayer. Not when it's a game that's specifically designed for MP, like L4D or CS or whatever, but games that have a significant single player mode, and then get MP tagged on as an excuse to not bother developing decent AI, to fill out a mediocre feature list, or because it's expected by the sort of players who can't bear to think that their mad skills are going unnoticed.
And because MP means balance issues and the inevitable watering down of everything in the game so that no one feels like they're at a disadvantage.
But yeah, I know I'm in a minority with that one lol
 
Litfod said:
Multiplayer. Not when it's a game that's specifically designed for MP, like L4D or CS or whatever, but games that have a significant single player mode, and then get MP tagged on as an excuse to not bother developing decent AI, to fill out a mediocre feature list, or because it's expected by the sort of players who can't bear to think that their mad skills are going unnoticed.
And because MP means balance issues and the inevitable watering down of everything in the game so that no one feels like they're at a disadvantage.
But yeah, I know I'm in a minority with that one lol
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I like Ken Levine said it best when talking about multiplayer "If its just going to be a check box why the fuck are you doing it?"

Paraphrased slightly as I don't remember what he said word for word, but the swear word was in it and that was basically what he was saying.
 
Games that boast widescreen res but just crop to make it fit a widescreen instead of actually making widescreen a benefit to the gamer with wider POV. Um, that's the same trick Kubrick used to do with movies like Clockwork Orange etc. He needed faster lens for natural low light shooting so shot with standard ratio lens then cropped the image to make it look sort of widescreen. That's all lots of these 'effing game companies are doing too.
 
theNoid said:
Gamers hating on other gamers because they play on other platforms.
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You know, I didn't mind when PCs where PCs and consoles were consoles, but when console gaming starts affecting pc gaming for the worse, then it starts to irk me a little.

Consoles should stick to racing, sports, rpg (I still prefer these on consoles, but PC does it well too), and platforming games. PC should stick with FPS, RTS, MMO. When you develop games toward a specific devices strength, you get games like Mario 64 and Half Life. When you don't, you get games like modern warefare 2 and halo wars.
 
Ryan711 said:
You know, I didn't mind when PCs where PCs and consoles were consoles, but when console gaming starts affecting pc gaming for the worse, then it starts to irk me a little.

Consoles should stick to racing, sports, rpg (I still prefer these on consoles, but PC does it well too), and platforming games. PC should stick with FPS, RTS, MMO. When you develop games toward a specific devices strength, you get games like Mario 64 and Half Life. When you don't, you get games like modern warefare 2 and halo wars.
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Halo Wars was a pretty good console RTS though. Sure its about as complex as the original CNC, but the fact that they managed to do it is surprising.
 
spine said:
• Regenerative Health

I'm sure I'm not alone on this one. Gone are the days of tactical play; gradually learning a map for health pack locations are long gone.
"Are you shot!?!?", EASY!, just duck 'n' Cover! All will be safe in 10 seconds time. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Hmmm... a tough one. Honestly, I don't mind regenerative health in some games, while in others I don't like it. It think it depends on what the style of the game is supposed to be.

Example: Battlefield, it's more "realistic" in terms of real men, real war, and that's what medics are for (that rhymed, didn't mean it too, lol). Therefore, the "old school" health pack method works.

But, in general, I think it would be best is there were perhaps a mix of both things, such as in Borderlands. Have the ability to get a shield etc. that helps regenerate health at different speeds, yet also have someone or something (such as med drops) to sometimes have to use to heal. I think that's the best balance... a mix of both.

spine said:

• Cover systems

Sorry, but I am more than capable of hiding and ducking behind an obvious chunk of broken wall in the face of incoming gunfire;
Nothing is more annoying than running/dodging around and then finding myself involuntarily clung to a piece of obviously insufficient debris that
the game has interpreted as 'cover' even though I can see the gunfire flying through my character's skull.
Click to expand...

What... you're not a fan of chest-high walls? LOL! All I can think about is ZeroTolerance's Gears review, filled with chest-high walls. Yeah, that gets annoying and almost feels too "contrived". Bad cover systems also obviously suck.

Games need to do away with chest-high walls (LOL, I laugh every time now), but work on cover systems and physics in order to make things realistic and useful without being glitched and do what they're supposed to do.

spine said:

• Too F#@&ing easy

I can barely remember the last single player game that really made me stop and think.
Much as I cringe at the harrowing 'will grow hairs on your chest' 'no savegame' mentality of past games (NES/SNES era);
at least you felt a sense of achievement having completed a certain section.
Now it's all, rewards this, bling that. I don't need a medal for opening the 100th door I had to open anyway.
Click to expand...


I can agree here, in large part, though I've played games in recent times that were challenging. Mass Effect 2 comes to mind, and, as someone else said, if it's a good game in general, than ratcheting-up the difficulty (as long as the option is available and works correctly) is always an option if the game is good, but a little too easy.

Of course, that depends on just how the higher difficulty setting works. Some are not implemented well, such as removing too much ammon or health pick-up, limiting weapons etc. But, many get it right for the most part, so it's usually an option.

Otherwise, I'd have to say... lack of anything really "grabbing" in games today. Not much being released that has any really strong and memorable aesthetic, and things are also getting far too linear in many games. I friggin' hate too much linearity unless it's something with a really strong aesthetic and great visuals and gameplay, such as Borderlands, or in terms of corridor shooters, DOOM (the original) or something.

Lack of any real online communities or the "community mentality" these days. I come from the early days of when there were a plethora of clans and people to get to know to play Soldier of Fortune, Battlefield etc. I miss that shit. Good people, good times back then.

Which leads to me to... people in general these days... seems to be just generally a lot more assholes and brain-dead people in the world today, and too many have made their way into the world of gaming.

Lack of dev support, definitely, or modding ability.

Too much with the "short-game-with-many-expansions" garbage.

Four-person co-op is great, but being done-to-death. Maintaining it for something like L4D or Borderlands is fine, but it seems like it's also becoming a fad.

General lack of something truly creative and innovative, which is why I love Borderlands (not hugely innovative, but it is in ways), and will love Guild Wars 2, which looks to be really innovative and in-depth, very high-quality and creative.

Probably some other things I could think of, but that'll do for now.
 
Enemies wearing masks. I can only assume it's the ESRB's influence—some kind of "more humane" reasoning, it's something I only started noticing maybe two years ago.
 
Nihilanth99 said:
Enemies wearing masks. I can only assume it's the ESRB's influence—some kind of "more humane" reasoning, it's something I only started noticing maybe two years ago.
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I doubt ESRB has anything to do with it. Just some trend that devs decided to jump on to for some insane reason.
 
Plague_Injected said:
Walking over a magic little cube that instantly restores a specific amount of health and cures all injuries that the player finds inexplicably laying around in random corners or against walls is no more realistic than regenerative health. A realistic health model would be for medkits to only stop or slow the flow of blood from wounds, or to have no kind of in-level health regeneration at all (like the original Ghost Recon).

My pet peeve, in shooters particularly, is terrible sound effects. The COD games are the biggest offenders here - they have $200 million production budgets and yet they have guns that sound like loose change jingling around in the player's pocket. They definitely sound nothing like the real weapons they feebly try to replicate.
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Agreed , how come they can't spend some budget money on recording the correct , high quality gun muzzle sounds?
 
Godmachine said:
Agreed , how come they can't spend some budget money on recording the correct , high quality gun muzzle sounds?
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America's Army did use actual recordings if I recall. While they captured the sound signature fairly well, It didn't quite capture what it sounds like to actually be firing the weapon. Probably because if they did, you'd go deaf. :D

Anyway, yeah this is also one of my pet peeves. Infact, in the new MOH game, the guns sound like your typical generic machine gun sound effect and I can't stand it.
 
Godmachine said:
Agreed , how come they can't spend some budget money on recording the correct , high quality gun muzzle sounds?
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Probably because most people don't care. Those that do are too small of a niche to worry about.
 
Plague_Injected said:
A realistic health model would be for medkits to only stop or slow the flow of blood from wounds, or to have no kind of in-level health regeneration at all (like the original Ghost Recon).
Click to expand...

This was also done in America's Army (don't know about the latest one with the UT3 engine) but yeah, if you were bleeding out, you'd slowly die unless a medic got to you... and if he got to you, you could only be as healthy as you were when he fixed you.

Which meant you could spend the last ten minutes of a round being forced to crawl everywhere because you're too injured to walk upright.

It's great for a realistic shooter. Doesn't really fly in the more popular fast paced instant gratification game play of MW2 and such.
 
Personally,I can't stand the checkpoint method. Or regenerative health. But most of all,I hate the consolized crap that passes for games these days,especially when it comes to FPS titles. Even when they're cross released for the PC,no real effort is usually made to take advantage of the PC's superior capabilities,they're just watered down direct ports.
 
Multiplayer mass moaning, i hate it when playing pretty much any online game i am flooded with moaning twats.
It used to be ok back in the day playing LAN or 4 player N64 because you could through something at the person moaning or disconenct them :p
 
KatalDT said:
This was also done in America's Army (don't know about the latest one with the UT3 engine) but yeah, if you were bleeding out, you'd slowly die unless a medic got to you... and if he got to you, you could only be as healthy as you were when he fixed you.

Which meant you could spend the last ten minutes of a round being forced to crawl everywhere because you're too injured to walk upright.

It's great for a realistic shooter. Doesn't really fly in the more popular fast paced instant gratification game play of MW2 and such.
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Agreed - I don't think every shooter should adopt the "be crippled or die from one shot" health model. My original point was to highlight the fallacy in the argument that magic cubes with crosses on them are no more realistic in restoring health than the regenerative model.

I don't mind either health model to be honest, but regenerative health doesn't necessarily equal lower difficulty. I've noticed that the player dies from far less damage in games like COD and Gears of War (where two hits within 10 seconds will kill) than they do in games with the other health model, so it balances out somewhat.
 
Plague_Injected said:
Agreed - I don't think every shooter should adopt the "be crippled or die from one shot" health model. My original point was to highlight the fallacy in the argument that magic cubes with crosses on them are no more realistic in restoring health than the regenerative model.

I don't mind either health model to be honest, but regenerative health doesn't necessarily equal lower difficulty. I've noticed that the player dies from far less damage in games like COD and Gears of War (where two hits within 10 seconds will kill) than they do in games with the other health model, so it balances out somewhat.
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I'd really rather have low health and regenerative HP than the old TONS OF HEALTH and health packs. I really hate games where you have to pump two clips into somebody (and most shots hit) to kill them.
 
theNoid said:
Gamers hating on other gamers because they play on other platforms.
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rampantandroid said:
I like PC gaming. I like my XBox as well (errr, I liked it before it's optical drive went crazy.) People hating on XBox gamers can stick it. It's a valid platform that means no DRM nonsense. And works well on my 50" Plasma.

As for regen health..well, I won't play COD1 because it has health packs. They were cool in UT GOTY. Now they plain suck ass. I prefer regen health, and not screaming for a medic for a minute before someone scratches me and I die. Delays on regen make it fine.

Cover systems can work, and mean that there's no more "how did he AWP me? Oh, there's a TINY gap between these boxes [get awped again] dammit!" When in cover...unless flanked, you live. Cool stuff.

Easy? Find the difficulty slider. Halo Reach legendary is hard.

In summary, it's "Pet peeves" not "pet hates" and you need to stick to playing your 10 year old games.

If you had said unlocks suck, I'd agree, but you missed that one.

/Agree on FOV bullshit.
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I agree 100% with both of you.
 
Most of these issues like low FOV, mouse acceleration, regenerating health, lack of difficulty, lack of quicksave...these are all traits from console that have spilled over to the PC because developers are too lazy and work on a lowest common denominator type development.

So my main gripe I guess is multi-platform games, they've more or less ruined PC gaming, the 360 being so similar to a PC is the worst thing to happen to PC gaming ever, period.
 
I hate regenerative health/shields, well I just hate the way most developers implement it. It is annoying and stupid mechanic when someone can run away for 5 seconds or duck around a corner or an object after you have whittled them down and all the sudden they are at full health. It completely takes away any skill required when it comes to evading enemy fire. It also takes away that adrenaline rush of when you are 1 or 2 hits from death, and you still kill a guys at full health. Nothing is better in CS or UT death match when I am 1 hit from death and I can still maneuver around and take out 3 opponents at full health..

Regenerative health should be something that regenerates veeeeery slow over time (rewards evasion/stealth skills) and increases in speed after you kill an enemy (adrenaline rush). Shields should require you to use some sort of external energy source that leaves you vulnerable while recharging.
 
mortonP said:
Games that boast widescreen res but just crop to make it fit a widescreen instead of actually making widescreen a benefit to the gamer with wider POV. Um, that's the same trick Kubrick used to do with movies like Clockwork Orange etc. He needed faster lens for natural low light shooting so shot with standard ratio lens then cropped the image to make it look sort of widescreen. That's all lots of these 'effing game companies are doing too.
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Yeah this is known as Vert- widescreen instead of the superior Horz+, www.widescreengamingforum.com deal with categorizing support and providing fixes for games.

My website www.pcgamingstandards.com also links to fixes for widescreen if available, and a whole host of other things like mouse acceleration, vsync etc. The site was made primarily because of the increase in these issues due to multi-platform development.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Most of these issues like low FOV, mouse acceleration, regenerating health, lack of difficulty, lack of quicksave...these are all traits from console that have spilled over to the PC because developers are too lazy and work on a lowest common denominator type development.

So my main gripe I guess is multi-platform games, they've more or less ruined PC gaming, the 360 being so similar to a PC is the worst thing to happen to PC gaming ever, period.
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The worst thing to happen to PC gamers are the elitists who think they are entitled to every game and should be made their way.:rolleyes:
 
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