The fact that games act like climbing doesn’t exist. You reach a path blocked by a small rock that any normally able bodied human could climb and it just pisses me off.

Like Pokémon games with a rock you could easily just walk around but noooo you gotta travel to this other town to get a special item or learn a special skill to get around this thing you could easily climb over or walk around.

No save option during stealth sequences or generally in stealth-heavy games. Allow me the option to either improvise and enjoy messing up or plan and execute and test every section of a stealth route carefully without having to replay the mission a thousand times, especially when the slightest hiccup will have the whole mission going awry. If that leads to some people save-scumming their way through the entire mission, so be it. Let them play their way.

Quests that demand that the player finds X of an unimportant item in a world which has exactly X instances of said item. Thankfully most games nowadays will offer up more of said item than needed to complete the quest, so that one doesn’t end up scouring the map over and over again, in search of that elusive last bottle/scroll/pigeon, because nobody got time for that. And not even talking about optional collectathon quests for those who want that sort of thing, some games would have this sort of quest in the main storyline.

Multiple un-skippable product and company credits at the start. Show a blinking “Loading…” if that is what is going on but let me skip this stuff on the second start onward.

I’ve got perhaps an unusual one - 99% of the time I play games with the music turned off. I just find it much more immersive and I enjoy, for example, not knowing that combat is about to start because the music’s just changed.

There are plenty of games where you can’t turn the music off. I’m not a fan of that, but I get it. The devs want you to play their game in a certain way, and turning the music off isn’t part of that. No complaints.

But then there are games which allow you to turn the music off, but all the rest of the sound has been made under the assumption that the music will be playing. The music often covers up a litany of jankiness like background sound effects not looping well. And sometimes the atmosphere sounds (say the drone of an engine in a spaceship) are also controlled by the music slider.

So, if you’re going to give the option to turn the music off, make sure that the game still sounds good without the music.

Text scaling in game where text is plot critical.

Important for things like steamdeck, some marked “verified” should be downgraded to “playable” due to the text size and inability to scale it.

Bad console ports on PC where mouse control code was recycled from gamepad control code. For example, in Just Cause 2, the maximum turn rate is capped and so is the minimum cursor acceleration, with the end result being when you move the mouse your character moves like you’ve mushed a gamepad control stick instead of the fast, smooth, PC cursor style movement of the reticle that every other PC FPS manages to pull off.

Excessive reliance on audio recordings and written text for storytelling / world building. Oh look another game where I’m alone in this world and I have to listen to a ton of audio recordings or collect snippets of text throughout the entire game to learn anything about this world and what happened to it!

If anything, let it be audio, not text, I’m tired of reading through often very subpar writing, I just glaze over it. Better yet, have actual (skippable) voice actors read any text out loud. Ideally, weave all that info into the game’s main storyline or side quests, and have it communicated to the player via interesting NPCs. Also, use environmental storytelling more than info-dumps. Show, don’t tell.

Text/in-world notes/memos/books and found audio recordings have a place but don’t let that be the main way of learning about the world or my place in it.

I understand it’s also a budget issue, so I’ll cut indie games some slack.

Heal-over-time systems in CoD-like shooters lack feedback and are unreliable in terms of measuring difficulty of a task and feeling like you did something special. Everything becomes boringly average.

1. When rebinding the keys, the game wont let me save the changes unless everything has something assigned.

2. During character creation the lightning on the model is completely different what you will see in game and I end up with an ugly character (Dragon’s Dogma, Saints Row 3 remaster, etc.)

Needing to log into an online account to play a single-player game.

When a single-player game keeps pausing to tell me it can’t connect to the server.

Indepth tutorials told by dialogue boxes. Run 5 steps.

[Hey player!]

[You know some boxes can be moved right?]

[Just walk up to the box]

camera pans 3 feet to the left to show the box in the centre of the screen

[Press X to grab it]

[And when youre done press X to let go]

[Im sure youll find many uses for this during your adventure]

[Why not try it on that box over there?]

<hmmmm. Seems like im going to need to move that box if I want to get anywhere>

When you get near the box a massive X symbol flashes madly and unmissably above your head, and theres lines on the floor showing where it needs to be pushed to, which is also the only way its programmed to move, literally impossible to do wrong, and you push it like 5 feet.

[Wow! You did it! Looks like you can get to the next area now!]

<I should probably remember that, it could be useful in the future>.

You’re now free to play the game, all the way to the next room, where you’ll spend way longer than necessary learning something a fucking 4 year old could figure out, and you dont even need figured out because its been a staple of games since before you were even born.

Not being able to pause or save at any point.

I’m a “grown-up” these days, but I grew up with games and they’re part of my life, and I love them - but in the larger scale of things, they’re still toys. The requirements of a pet/partner/child/phone call/doorbell will always nearly always outrank them.

“We don’t let you pause because it’s a simulation and and you can’t pause real life so it means the game is more realistic” = piss off

I’m souring on difficulty options lately. How am I supposed to know the ideal difficulty of a game without having played it before? You’re the developer, you designed it and if you’re confident in your game balance you should pick the default difficulty. Better yet, get rid of discrete difficulties and add customizable assist mode instead.