The Arkham series was already an exercise in great story hiding behind bad gameplay. But I don’t even know if that held true for Arkham Knight, because 3 minutes into the thing you get put in a driving mini game that has absolutely shitty controls and is required to progress into the actual story. Since that proved impossible for me, I just wasted the price of the game and now I’ve gone from disdain for Rockstar as a studio to outright hate. Making the combat system in a Batman game into Dance Dance Revolution was stupid enough, but unskippable cross-genre skill gates are unforgivable.
Related, but slightly more forgiveable bcs it isn’t required to progress the main story, The Pitt DLC for Fallout 3 has a section where the designers suddenly felt like Fallout had an a engine capable of being a 3D Platformer, and that people who’d already spent 30+ hours in Fallout 3 would enjoy having to do precision platform jumps to get to the good loot.
Basically, if you suddenly have a mini game or section that belongs to an entirely different genre, don’t force people to engage with that, some of us hate driving games, some of us hate platformers, and I’m pretty sure nobody at all wanted a driving minigame in their Batman Rhythm-Soulslike.
Starfield. God awful pacing and dialog that made you go “oh please shut up”. I went to neon and every vendor had a 5+ minute cutscene wah wah side quest story i couldn’t give a shit about.
“Oh somebody fucked my robot and now im sad so let me explain that again with 20 paragraphs” -Shop Keeper I don’t give a shit fuck about your dumb robo bitch i have 20 spacesuits i need to sell so i can fast travel again.
The fact they didn’t bother to add a dialog box first to access a service or buy/sell goods before the vendor starts telling you their life story was enough to make me not play again.
I quit playing the new ‘demo’ skate game because I don’t like all the loading screens compared to previous games that were played with a disk.
Caveblazers: The object of the game is a treasure at the end of the cave. When you finally get to the end, it turns out that the “treasure” is a harem of bikinied women. The final boss is this goblin guy who spends his days raping them, and then when you defeat the boss, the women move into YOUR cave so that YOU can do the same. This is a roguelike game that otherwise has no story and was pretty fun, but the ending is just awful. I can’t find anybody else talking about how terrible it is except for one reviewer on YouTube, but the video disappeared years ago.
Persona 4: The whole game is about people accepting parts of themselves that they try to reject and becoming their “true self.” EXCEPT for Kanji who is gay and Naoto who is trans. Their arcs are the reverse of everybody else, they are forced to reject their true self in order to conform with what the other characters want them to be like. There’s a scene after Naoto’s dungeon where the team forces them to detransition on the spot. Start acting like a woman NOW NOW NOW. When I heard that the character’s voice actor change her voice to be more feminine in that scene, I quit the game. They force Naoto to say “I will never be a man.” This is also, by the way, one of the most fiercely debated topics on the Internet, I’ve seen people online get more heated about the “Kanji gay Naoto trans” debate than any other topic.
So you’re saying Kanji is gay, and Naoto is fake?
/s
the first boss scene in 007 first light that takes makes you incapable of the same melee combat you were just doing 30 seconds earlier
The RC helicopter missions in Vice City.
That goddam monkey level in SNES The Lion King
No Mans Sky. I just wanted to fly about and explore new planets. No! You must repair you ship first; find 30 jizz crystals. Ok, there’s some. To mine jizz crystals you need a shart hammer. To create a shart hammer you need 13 arse nuggets. To mine arse nuggets you need a piss laser etc etc etc
Let me fly dammit!I’m not ashamed to admit I selectively enabled free crafting to skip grinding in that game. I have very little patience for games that force me to spend time doing loads of boring busywork to “earn” the right to enjoy the fun parts. But at least No Man’s Sky allows you to tweak the gameplay experience very granularly to make it suit your taste. More games should be like that.
I quit Silk Song when I got to the pogo insanity. That’s not fun.
Which part was that? If you’re talking about the hallway in Sands of Karak, I’m pretty sure that it’s not required for progression.
TOTK: last boss fight stages.
Zelda Breath of the Wind: Weapon durability. Fuck I was so annoyed by that. Even the Master Sword with it’s cooldown. That felt like a really disrespectful design choice for OG Zelda fans.
Will be the last Zelda game I (attempted to) play, although it pains me.
First time I picked it up I had this same problem but you get far enough into the game and you never really run out of weapons so I eventually just ignored it
at least you didn’t need to keep fusing stuff to them to make them do anything but provide a light tickle to enemies
Regarding to traditional design of Zelda, yes! Yet it’s intentional to keep you detached from your weapons, forcing you to try out everything.
Force Unleashed, the “drop a star destroyer with force” part. It is frustrating to control, there are whole bunch of guides solely for that part, because of how frustrating it is. The worst part, it’s pretty close to the end, so you are this close to finishing, but nope.
Darktide and Mechwarrior 5 because of size bloat. They started out at around 60Gb, and now they’re over 90. I have a laptop. I can’t just upgrade disk space. Please stop bloating the bloody games. Same with several other games that have been large from day one. Bummer, really.
Life is Strange
The entire premise is that the protagonist can turn back time, and make different decisions.
Except for cut-scenes. As soon as a cut-scene hits, suddenly its “You aren’t able to rewind time right now”, with no narrative explanation. Like, I get that you didn’t want to program that part, but the entire premise is about rewinding time, to try different decisions. Now I’m stuck having made an arbitrary decision, because I thought I was going to be able to go back and pick differently.
The ending makes you want to quit even more Just wait and see.
i usually quit after the ending anyway
It’s always at a point where the game suddenly requires a skill that isn’t part of its usual gameplay. I played a crafting and exploration game that suddenly has a huge platforming element in the late game in a dungeon, and it was even timed! The rest of the game involved no platforming, and it wasn’t even particularly difficult to do but I suck at platforming, never enjoyed it, and I especially did not need the stress of a timer in an otherwise relaxing game.
Another story rich game which was heavy on logistics suddenly turned into a shooter. No, thank you.
Another thing I hate is when I turn the difficulty down and the only option is to do it across the board so I may as well stop interacting with the game. I know I’m bad at fast-paced precision inputs. That doesn’t mean I don’t want cool puzzles to solve or complex systems.
I know, I know: “get good.” I’m old. Shooting and platforming are not the skills I care to be developing at this stage of my life.
This.
There’s an indie platformer called Fallen Leaf that has really good reviews. In the opening cutscene you are told a story about how in the past the world was saved by sealing away a great evil underground. The first level of the game sees you exploring a cave that your main character didn’t even want to be in, at the behest of his sister (IIRC).
Some ways into the cave your path is blocked by a talking bear who politely but firmly explains that it is dangerous ahead and no one may pass. If you attempt to get past them, they gently boop you back.
What the game clearly wants you to do is shoot a stalactite so that it falls on the bear. No, game, I don’t think I’m going to murder this innocent bear just so that I can be the one who releases the ancient evil I will spend the rest of the game fighting against. I will just quit here while the world is still safe and the polite bear is unharmed, thanks.
I hate it when games make you do heinous shit like this just to advance the plot. Call me any name you like, I don’t enjoy being a terrible person in a game that I didn’t go into with the expectation of playing the part. It just sucks and makes me not want to play your game.
