This feels like a return home as a prodigal son. This is actually the third time I’ve written a piece on video game irritants that rub me the wrong way. The first two were done for a respected independent gaming website that I wrote for a long time ago. That site closed up shop over a decade ago, though, a victim of the advancing ages of the staff (most of us were in our 20’s and had a lot more free time back then) and our collective inability to keep churning out work on a regular basis. Since we didn’t advertise and had no real income, the site founders decided to let it go when it became too much to sustain. I’ve tried looking for some possibly preserved work through search engines, but the best I’ve been able to come up with are top-half screenshots, and none of them are pics of any of my own work. And I only found those after sifting through dozens of pages and a handful of different possible search terms. I think it’s safe to assume those first two bits have fallen into the internet’s vast black hole.
Video games are like any other medium: They evolve, and it’s up to those of us who love them to adapt to their evolution as much as we can. Every time you think the development of video games is about to slam into a wall, it will take games in a new direction and find new ways of going in the same direction. And with new quirks in gaming comes the fact that, when they start out, a lot of them aren’t going to be very good. They might find ways to become good in a desolate future or become obsolete – both happened with irritants I mentioned in the first two pieces – but for now, they’re not going to be very good. So I’ve had nearly 15 years to develop whole new problems with whole new kinds of video games, and that means it’s time to punch up a brand new list of video game nuisances that serve to frustrate gamers. And through it all, I’ve come to the realization that I’m never going to run out of gaming irritants to write about. And so, here are the things that drive me crazy about modern video games. None of them are deal-breakers, but they’re all things which can be a real drag and put a stopper on an otherwise rewarding experience.
Fetch Quests
You know how marketers always love to brag about how many hours of gameplay are in a particular game? Yeah, smart gamers have learned to check that. Such marketing is a prominent part of big name open-world titles like the Assassin’s Creed series or the Horizon games. Usually the reaction to a market boast about game length is along the lines of “Yeah, but how much of that time am I going to end up spending getting from one place to another?” Fetch quests are both the natural evolution AND the lazy cousin of the equally terrible scavenger hunt, features of older 3D games which forced gamers to collect some odd number of kooky items in order to advance. Fetch quests, while not being nearly as cruel, are still going to occupy more truckloads of time than a working adult probably has.
Fetch quests are easier than scavenger hunts because you know there’s only one thing you’re after and you know exactly where you have to pick it up. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the location you have to visit is on the other side of the map, across some swamp, a patch of ice lava, and a sky whirlpool. And that’s not even bringing the local wildlife into the equation; every human in the way is out to rob you and every animal on the road is ferociously territorial. When you reach your destination, you’re nearly dead and the trip has taken up so much of your gaming time that it’s barely worth even starting the return. Fetch quests aren’t so much good design as they are uninspired ways to put you through endurance tests. They force gamers to use up time and resources in the pursuit of some random McGuffin. Granted, some titles do have ways of mitigating a lot of travel these days – the Horizon games have their fast travel packs, for example – but still, no one wants to hear about 60 hours of gameplay if 50 hours will be spent en route to everywhere.
Crafting
I have to admit that crafting once came across as a unique and interesting little gimmick that added a little bit of depth to a game. My first encounter with it was way back in Final Fantasy IX, when it was called “synthesis” and took two items. I took to the idea because it was optional and usually resulted in something pretty good, although I rarely had the items I needed. Unfortunately, it has since gone on its development path and gone in a very difficult direction. Crafting is, of course, the process of using several small, meaningless items to blend and make into something that can be put to real use. It still sounds like a nifty idea, but lately it feels like devs are becoming way too dependent on it as a way of padding difficulty. In games like The Witcher or Horizon, it’s used to create basic, essential items from things that are completely meaningless. To streamline why I don’t like this, here’s the process: You open your inventory and learn you need arrows. You can craft them, but you need a certain number of three different items. So you then have to go out and find a certain number of those three different items.
If the item you’re trying to craft is basic enough, this usually isn’t a problem. But if you need to craft something that’s powerful or cool, then you’ve just started a randomized version of a fetch quest. Sometimes the crafting items necessary for the GOOD stuff are rare, and so you find yourself using up two slots in your limited inventory for two of the necessary items only to never find the third. Or maybe you’ve discovered that elusive final item only to have to start over because you were forced into an inventory dump a little while ago and resigned yourself to never getting what you needed. If you’re lucky, maybe the game you’re playing will let you work around the tedium of crafting – Horizon Zero Dawn offered the option to simply buy ammunition if a gamer lacked the items to craft it, an option which I shamelessly used unless I needed basic hunting arrows. Crafting has clearly seen its day and has turned from a fun feature to an elaborate method of ammo deprivation.
Statement Boss Battles
Boss battles have been a part of video games for a long time, and I don’t see them ever going away. They’re not my beef here. No, my beef when I write about statement boss battles is a particular KIND of boss battle. When people of a certain age imagine boss battles, we tend to think of enemies that are very, very difficult and can soak up a lot more punishment. But for all the difficulty of those boss battles, most of them tend to last just a few minutes if you’re quick. Hell, even fighting on the defensive for a particularly difficult boss battle can yield a victory in… Seven minutes, tops. THIS kind of boss battle tends to run close to a half hour because someone is using it to show something off. Statement boss battles take place in several phases, each tougher than the last, but they all involve an elaborate process of dodging and weaving and waiting for just the right opening. Then when that opening comes, you can get in and hit the boss a few times. And the times you hit the boss barely have any effect on it whatsoever.
These are annoying not only because of the amount of time and patience it takes to finish one, but because a boss adds an extra element of tension (“tension” there is meant to be read as “unnecessary stress and frustration). Although some of these boss battles add the nicety of letting you begin at the part of the battle where you lost a life, many still don’t, and that means the whole process has to be repeated if you lose. Every well-timed jump, dodge, and successful hit counts for nothing on a lost life. And you can’t save the game in the middle of the battle. Soulslike games prominently feature boss battles like this. Yes, I realize the difficulty in beating bosses in Dark Souls or Bloodborne is part of the point, but that doesn’t mean I should be forced to commit an hour to a single boss even if I’m NOT dying in the process. The one game I can give a pass to is Shadow of the Colossus, but that’s because the boss fights are the only fights in the game.
Mook Boss Battles
The terrible cousin of the above, and its polar opposite as well. This kind of boss battle is usually against a foe so uninspired that it looks like it was thrown at some point after the game went gold. So how does a developer compensate? By throwing every mook in the game at the player at the same time, so that we get so distracted trying to keep the regular enemies off our backs that we periodically forget about the boss just standing there. Sometimes, these waves of regular old enemies are part of a phase of attack; the boss sends a swarm at you, waits for you to fight it off, and then jumps in himself for a round of attacks. Sometimes the boss will jump in on the action right where it’s thickest. This kind of boss fight helps drag down the Mass Effect and Batman Arkham games, which just goes to prove that no game is perfect.
This kind of boss fight is generally less annoying than the giant statement monsters, but they suck just the same. Although one could argue they’re not exactly cheap, they certainly feel that way because energy can get zapped so quickly. But the issue here isn’t cheapness; it’s just that these fights are so unpleasant. They can completely throw off the flow of an excellent game and give off a nasty case of tiring repetition. The feel can be mitigated in games like Mass Effect, where most of the toughest bosses are little more than enemies with extra shielding. But the Batman Arkham games ramp it up because even the lowest enemies can take a minute or two to knock out, armed enemies can make quick work of Batman, and bosses alternate between having attack windows and being small enough to get lost in a crowd.
Quicktime Events
Quicktime events are short, but they’re also good at messing with gamers. They’re also pretty simple, but they also somehow still manage to be giant nightmares and pains in the ass. Any gamer reading this can already identify the scene: They’ve just finished a significant event or battle which caused them a good amount of stress and frustration. All the signs given by the game have indicated they’re finally in the clear: The camera zoomed in, the game relieved the player of all control, and the player character launched into what initially looked like a really cool finish. NOW would be the time to put the controller down, take a sip of your beer, and enjoy the ensuing cinematic. But right when the coup de grace begins, a big sign flashes onto the screen and now you have to race back to the controller in two seconds and jam on the button before everything is cancelled out. If you’re too slow, you have to play through at least the final phase again. In worst case scenarios, it’s an instant Game Over.
If you’re a hardcore gamer who craves meeting a challenge and overcoming it, quicktime events are terrible because they can be cheap ways of making you run through a hard fight again. If you’re a gamer who just wants to experience a good story, they’re a pain because they make you run through the same cutscene repeatedly and deprive you of your gamers’ right to skip through it after you’ve memorized it. Time has made quicktime events even worse because the evolution of video games has enabled developers to randomize the button presses necessary to finish the event. That means older gamers like myself can’t simply memorize the sequence in the same way we learned and reacted to patterns in the old days. All of these make quicktime events terrible even when you’re aware that you could be thrown into one at any time; the God of War series swears by them, and gamers who love the series still get pissed off even when we know exactly where to expect them.
Water Levels
These things have been gaming staples since before time itself, and that’s pretty much also how long gamers have hated them. Water levels have never been much good. In a best case scenario, the most you can expect from water levels is for your controls to suddenly become hampered and the game to enter into a slow motion mode, most often against enemies who have no problem at all moving around underwater. In the worst case, you get offered a whole new set of controls which aren’t much good and forced to dodge enemies because you’re no longer able to properly attack them.
Air meters became prominent once gaming started entering the third dimension. Yes, they had been there before that; the Ecco the Dolphin series, a series starring a photorealistic dolphin, used one to create a sense of realism and add a punch to the already mysterious and isolated atmosphere. Sonic the Hedgehog used to have to breathe air bubbles while he was underwater. While I understand wanting to give off a sense of realism, though, air meters these days seem to be used more and more as a design crutch. If the character in a game is swimming through an underground tunnel, they can expect the Game Over screen a few times. Honestly, it would be nice to give characters an underwater breathing apparatus, at the least, if devs were worried that the game starring an anthropomorphic creature called a Lombax and his robot sidekick wasn’t realistic enough.
Stealth Sections
So you’re playing a game, and things are going pretty well. The time you’ve been playing varies from game to game, but generally you’ve been at it long enough to have amassed an arsenal worthy of the town armory. You’ve also been regularly charging into various rooms with a gun in each hand and blowing the other guys away. Its been your go-to routine for accomplishing missions, in fact; no, it’s not exactly subtle, but it gets the job done, and you appreciate the bluntness of it because a dead bad guy can’t sneak up from right behind you after you let them be by sneaking around. So after doing this for enough gameplay hours to establish a preferred method of tackling any given mission, the game finds a ludicrous reason to saddle you with a new set of rules: No killing! In fact, you don’t even get to be seen! Running in the way you usually do is out of the question, and half the time, fighting isn’t even an option at all. In fact, in some games, being seen automatically means the game is over, and you get to start that whole dreadful section again.
If gamers like stealth, there’s an entire genre of games that let us do it through a whole game. Metal Gear Solid, Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, and other such series tackle stealth well because they’re entirely made of it. In games which require the occasional stealth mission, though, it’s a pain in the ass. It’s not so much the stealth itself that pisses gamers off as what it frequently entails. Stealth sections are half-assed – much of the time, the game offers a duck button and sends you off. The enemies’ sightlines all vary depending on how far you get, cover is sparse, and being seen means you get to start everything all over again. Stealth sections are almost never fun. Most of them feel like attempts to compensate for a lack of depth. Finding a stealth section near the beginning of Final Fantasy XII which was tedious and punishing was just one of the things that put me off that game; and it was a true low point for the series.
Piling Objectives
When is a basic, regular mission just a basic, regular mission? Well, I don’t know the answer to that question, but I know when it isn’t, and that’s when you play video games. Especially open world video games. Longtime gamers already know they can expect that after you’ve been playing a game for a few hours, every basic objective they pursue within the main story is going to have a few extra layers added, and soon missions are going to start being dragged out for no reason other than length. A mission that was expected to be a 15-minute jaunt to the outskirts of the wilderness – not including the time it takes to actually travel there – can easily have another 45 minutes tacked on when the journey ends up not being the ultimate destination.
While the piling of objectives is irksome during the main story, it can be particularly frustrating if you’re just trying to tackle a quick side mission. Well-made side missions can be a joy no matter what kind of gamer you are – gamers who like a challenge can usually find an extra hurdle to cross, gamers who play to completion or to explore will open up a new part of the game’s world, and gamers who play for story can have the main story rounded or fleshed out. And in some games, they’re quick, dirty, and right to the point – the Mass Effect games did side missions so efficiently that they recycled settings and scenery a lot. But they do occasionally get taken to the extreme and infinitely dragged out. When a side quest gets padded to the point where it’s basically just another main quest and it can’t be finished in 20 minutes, it becomes an exercise in tedium. And sometimes these side missions even affect the main story – the Horizon games crossed the line to such a point that it was sometimes tough to tell the difference. Zero Dawn had the rescue of Itamen and Forbidden West had Kotallo’s new arm and Chainscrape’s change of power. All long quests, all very important to the story, and you wonder why they’re optional at all.
Incomplete games
The transition from cartridges to CDs was slow and awkward and people didn’t pick it up at first. The Sega CD and Turbo CD didn’t work out, the 3DO was a certifiable disaster, and the CD-I wasn’t even meant to be a video game console. Nintendo had the plans drawn up for a CD add-on and were in the testing phase of a console with Sony when they dropped the project to start over with Phillips. But after Sony released their ex-Nintendo project as its own console, everyone saw the benefits of CD technology in video games and the transition was rather quick. CD technology gave gamers bigger games and a bigger drawing board for devs who were eager to see what they could really do.
Unfortunately, corporations saw an advantage themselves in later console generations: They could rush a game out to release and not worry about whether or not it’s actually, you know, playable. Why, they could put out a glitchy, buggy game right now and not worry about it because they could patch it up later! Gamers would be paying full price for the game right off the bat right now, so why should they give a fuck? There are high-profile releases – like Mass Effect Andromeda and Cyberpunk 2077 – that managed to create their reputations on the fact that they were bugged messes which were eventually patched up. But that still begs the question of why gamers have to pay full price for them upon release.
DLC and Microtransactions
Here we go. The motherload. The thing that modern gamers hate more than anything. The thing fueling retrogaming as a hobby. The thing that all gamers are united in their hatred of. The thing so bad that other, smarter first world countries were forced into creating LAWS to keep gamers from getting completely fucked over. Unfortunately, to get a game that’s fully fleshed out these days, you’re not only looking at online connectivity and a subscription account, you’re also going to be forced to pay for something that games from earlier generations would have just included with the games. Yeah, the idea of games being released as what they are has been sidelined, and that’s famously been for all the worse in video games.
Let me run this down: You pay for a base game. Then a developer releases some brand new item or area which is hidden behind a paywall. So in addition to the $60 you paid for the game if you bought it new, you’re now paying a surcharge. Some games have subscriptions. Some have packs which reveal new missions which reveal more relevant information about the game’s background. Some have weapons which would have been useful had they been included in the base game. Some have special little skins, suits, and knickknacks for completionists. But no matter how good and worthwhile they feel, no matter how much effort is apparent in them, they all share a common purpose: To separate gamers from their money. Be that as it may, that means the initial price tag is a big lie and you’re going to be paying a lot more money for the full version of the game. You can make the case for online connectivity in gaming as loud as you damn well fucking please. But as long as DLC exists and you’re paying for it, guess what? To the CEOs running Activision and Electronic Arts and Nintendo, you’ll never be anything more than a sucker.