A rant on modern video games.

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This is to any game designers who may be reading, and just to vent. Some things I hate in modern video games? Let me count them.

1. Cut scenes. I'm not playing your game because I want to watch a movie. I dislike cut scenes very much because they take away player control and break up smooth game play. Especially bad are cut scenes right before a major fight, where the fight is starting and YOU STILL DONT HAVE CONTROL BACK! Seconds pass, the enemy advances, and I cant move or raise my weapon! Its also very aggravating when the end of a cut scene returns you to default status. Like in say Call of Duty, where I was all ready with my LAWS rocket launcher to take out a tank or machine gun nest, a stupid cut scene happens, and when I recover control I'm holding my assault rifle! A good designer can handle the story part of the game without or with minimal cut scenes. Also very annoying are scripted fights that contain cut scenes.

2. Mini games. Gamers, raise your hand if you hated the asteroid shoot in Dead Space as much as I did. The only good part of mini games is when they are over and you can get back to the main mission. I still remember the sloppy mechanics of the Duke Nukem Forever mini games...AHHHHH!! !!

3. Bullet sponge boss monsters. There is no more cheap and lazy way to prolong a boss fight than by making the boss a bullet sponge. This is esp bad when only a certain part of the boss takes damage from attacks.

4. Tracking missions. You have to chase someone, and you cant get to close, and you cant get to far, and if you mess up even a little you have to do the whole thing over again. This crap started with the Spider-Man games and now infests the Superhero genera.

5. Turret battles. I hate forced turret battles because you cant run and you are pretty much a sitting duck. The forced turret fights pretty much killed any desire I had to play Duke Nukem Forever on higher difficulty.

The only game I've played that I can recall where cutscenes seriously interfered with gameplay in the way you mention is Resident Evil 6. That was such a terrible game for so many other reasons, but the way cutscenes and the camera work in that game were truly awful. You know how in many games how if the game wants to show you the objective, the camera will point there? As in you step on the switch in Zelda and the camera will show you the door that opens on the other end of the dungeon? Well, Resident Evil 6 does this constantly during gameplay, whilst in the midst of combat, and it does not stop the game whilst the camera does its thing. So you might be just about to line up a headshot on an approaching enemy, and then the camera will go to show you some random door you need to open, and then when the camera comes back to you you're dead.

With cutscenes in general, I generally dislike them but again it depends on the context. I'm generally not going to get upset with cutscenes in a story heavy adventure game like any of the Telltale games. But I remember being really, really annoyed in Doom whenever I had to be locked in a room and listen to Samuel Hayden talk. And those moments weren't even that long, they just stopped me from what I'd rather be doing.

With mini games I can be for or against them. It depends on whether it interferes with the flow of the game and makes sense in context for me. I always loved the way gameplay changed in adventure games like Full Throttle, where you'd take time away from pointing and clicking to play whack a mole with a car crusher and dog, fight guys whilst biking down the road, or driving around in a destruction derby. And a game like Nier: Automata, with its constant switching between third person action, 2D side scroller, shmup and 8 bit shooter, would be a totally different game without its constant changing of gameplay sequences. On the other hand I hated the 'hacking' minigames in Bioshock and thought they were the worst idea ever, having to stop to play Pipe Mania regularly. It interrupted the flow of the game massively and made no sense - how does rearranging pipes to direct water hack a device?

One thing that I would add to a list of issues with modern games is hand holding in general, but more specifically when a game constantly shows you the location of your objective. This is worst in open world games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 where a compass always shows you where to go and even the location of enemies that you might not even see yet. I would much rather have quest givers or logs tell me more information on how to do a quest, and if I wanted help navigating the game could give me an actual map and compass.

Another issue I have is with padding out a game's length with nonsense. Recently I played Rise of the Tomb Raider, and though it isn't especially egregious with this I bring it up just because it's the most recent game I've played guilty of this. Its game world is littered with pointless objectives that have nothing to do with the story or characters, and exist purely to give the player extra things to do. Now things like this in games can generally be ignored, but doing so means you miss out on in game rewards and the game is typically balanced around you doing this extra padding. I would much rather play a shorter, better game than a long game artificially extended with filler content.

I definitely echo the bit about cutscenes. Ugh. I hate them. HATE THEM. As you said, I'm not here to watch a damn movie. I came here to play a game, so I expect to PLAY the damn thing. Not to mention that, frankly, the story in the vast majority of video games just.... seems bad to me. If I want a story, I'll go read a book. Which I have about a bazillion of, and stories in games never even compare to those... so I never come to games for stories. Thus I just cant bring myself to care. My idea of a good story is something like that of R-Type: "Blast off and strike the evil Bydo Empire!" That's it. That's the entire thing. It gave you a ship, showed you the bad guys, and then booted you right into the action. That's what I want. Some games I play these days dont have a storyline whatsoever.

Not to mention that I tend to find that the more a game focuses on story, the more braindead easy it is. The developer wants to make sure that everyone can get the full experience (because they might not buy the next 80 sequels otherwise), and that means dumbing it way the heck down. The JRPG genre is my prime example of this (seriously, those are *really* easy these days... even the "hard" ones).


Speaking of easy: I hate a lack of challenge. Most major modern games are utterly lacking in challenge. Now, I'll admit: As a fan of roguelikes and bullet-hell games... AKA the two most difficult genres of them all... I have a somewhat warped idea of what a "challenge" is. But I mean, come on. With most modern games you dont even have to TRY anymore.

Along with that, most of them are very lacking in depth or complexity. It's as if alot of big developers have this idea that their entire consumerbase is incredibly stupid and cant handle too much of this without their heads exploding.


Finally: Graphics obsession. Graphics dont make the freaking game. I stopped being impressed by this like a decade ago. I sure dont care about it now. Either the game is good, or it isnt... I dont care much what it looks like.


Just.... bleh. I dont bother with AAA games much these days (with very rare exceptions). I just stick with indie stuff (on Steam) and that's likely to be permanent. From what I've seen, the AAA side of the industry just keeps getting worse.

If I was still playing AAA games though, I think loot boxes would be added to this list. I'm so glad I dont have to deal with those.

Oh and another pet peeve of mine. Games with puzzles in them where if you don't solve them in a really short time the game just flat out tells you the answer with a 'hint' system. Drives me absolutely crazy. Why put a puzzle in a game if you just tell me the answer? I feel sorry for whoever went to the trouble of making these intricate puzzles, when some doofus decides to have the player character reveal the solution in dialogue within half a minute of encountering it.

I haven't played the most recent Zelda games, but I remember quite a lot of the early 3D Zelda games were especially bad with this. You'd enter a room, have a look around, start working out the room's puzzle and then your assistant, be it Navi/Tatl etc would interrupt and tell you point blank the answer. At least some games are starting to get a bit better with this with the option to turn hint systems off.

My favorite way for story to be incorporated into a game is through the environment and through mechanics that don't interfere with the gameplay. Games like Dark Souls, SOMA and Bioshock do this well. There's a lot of story in these games but you can choose how far you want to go into it. You can go through the entirety just knowing the gist of the story, or you can go into every bit of text if you like and get into the details.

I agree with the depth/complexity issue. Generally it seems to be something that affects PC games as they look to cater towards console systems, or niche games as they become more popular. I feel like nothing shows this as much as the Dragon Age series; it was developed specifically for a niche audience on PC who longed for the old style of top down tactical RPGs popular in the 90s, requiring constant tactical planning and forethought into how you would create your party, developing their abilities in ways that would synergise with each other, planning how you would initiate combat and what positioning you'd take, who you'd take out first and who to use crowd control for. But as it transitioned to console and became more popular it just became way too simplified for its own good, essentially playing like a watered down hotbar based MMO by its third iteration with none of the aforementioned elements.

I think the Soulborne series has been the only recent series I can think of that has successfully transitioned from niche to wide appeal without losing the depth that led people to like it in the first place. Largely I think it's because the developers just seem to like to do their own thing and since they're making decent money the publishers haven't really felt a need to meddle. I'm glad they went with Namco Bandai instead of some publisher like Square Enix, who undoubtedly would've called any amount of sales they had a failure and pushed to somehow make the next game more like Call of Duty, or Konami, who would've made Dark Souls into a pachinko game.

I didn't mind short cut scenes. In older Final Fantasy games they were like a highlight of some of the most dramatic scenes. I think they're supposed to be immersive but too many has the opposite effect with all the pauses.

I'm fine with cut scenes, but I primarily play games for the story.

My last game was The Evil Within. It has LOTS AND LOTS of aggravating cut scenes, not just at the start and end of levels but all over the place. Some that are the start of major battles, adding even more down time after dying and having to reload, and the reload times in EW were terrible long.

Yeah, there are many games where cut scenes are implemented poorly.

I didn't like the way they were handled in "Mass Effect 3."

I like cutscenes. But what I don't like is I think the "bullet sponge" you were talking about, unless I misunderstood. In tomb raider legend, whenever you have the big boss fight of the level, the big boss can heal from the bullets you shoot them with, and they have magic too so they are just zooming around making their magic fly everywhere as they try to kill you and I can only get a shot in every now and then but these bosses magically heal from their wounds and it's like. Stay the hell down dude. I shot a regular, non magical dude where it counted and he didn't even stagger!

But somehow when I do finally manage to beat big boss scenes, I don't realize I've done it. I'll be just like that scene in the Incredibles "we're deaaaad! we're deaaaad! we' survived but we're deaaaaaaad!" and I'm pretty sure there is like a glitch in tomb raider because I still had people to kill that were leftover and it let me go and stop fighting them to go find that random old dude that is always like AYE UP LARA COME OVER ERE and it's like excuse me, if you haven't noticed, I have a tonne of people trying to murder me, so if you could be so kind to shut up and be patient, thanks...

I think I'm just awful at video games though because the rare times where I give up and watch walkthroughs I just see people go BAM! BAM! 300 HEADHOTS IN A ROW! And I'm just running around screaming and barely getting any shots in. And everyone is complaining that video games are getting easier, so if that's the case, I'm so bad at them.