Gaming (UI and more) Annoyances (PC, consoles or console ports)

Games
1

Grrr. Since everyone knows I just buy games, configure them and never play, I’ve been going through a lot of this lately on a new Windows install. Therefore, this thread shall collect all my bitching and moaning at different times when I can remember them.

Annoyance #1:
Ultra/Max settings that aren’t really that (ie set it to Max but you can still increase anistropic filtering etc)

Annoyance #2: Bad
Resolution changes that take effect immediately as you step through them, sometimes made worse without an auto-timeout to revert if things fuck up

Annoyance #3:
Ports that top out at 1920x1080, without 16:10 resolutions, 2560x1440 or 4K resolution, access to all refresh rates available to Windows by the hardware

Annoyance #4:
Codemasters, I’m looking at you for this one: Inconsistent level of settings (low, med, high, ultra) for each setting. Some have 3, some have 4, some have 5, who the hell knows?

Annoyance #5:
QT3 Hivemind, do you prefer your settings to cycle/loop or hard stop at the min-max ranges?

Annoyance #5:
Games that don’t allow Alt-F4 or Alt-Tab or Alt-Enter (to toggle fullscreen).

Annoyance #6:
Change settings without having to restart the game

Annoyance #7:
Unskippable splash screens, tutorials before even getting to the main menu which run in ugly 720p defaults

Annoyance #8:
Quick Save, give it to us

Annoyance #9:
Allow axis inversion

Annoyance #10:
We’re not console peasants who turn off our PC mid-game.

Annoyance #11:
WTF don’t let us use Windows clipboard to copy and paste our complex password? (Fuck you HAWKEN)

Nice to haves:
-Exposed XML/INI files to extra configuration, tweaking to override settings
-Benchmark mode

Anyone else have anything else to gripe about?

2

I love this thread. :)

A couple of quick extras as I’m meant to be working:

Locked framerates. 30 in particular.

Non-scaling UI/fonts. Need to squint on high res displays, or scroll lists with half an empty screen they could expand into.

Hotkeys/buttons that open screens, but don’t close them. Worse when you’re mired in submenus, and that ‘start’ button you initially used doesn’t take you straight back to the game.

The inability to hotswap between mouse/keys and controller.

Probably not any one games fault, but lack of a standardized save location.

3

Annoyance #WTF:
Games with another account service (WB etc.) to login/link even though they can use Steam.

4

Sequels that move UI elements or button functions around compared to previous games in the series.
Games that don’t let you disable “automatic lock-on” or “aim assist” features.
3D games with lock-on mechanics that don’t center the camera to whatever you locked onto.

And for some stuff that isn’t just me complaining about Kingdom Hearts: Re:Chain of Memories:

Games that don’t let you remap buttons are obviously bad, but the one I ran into over the weekend really got to me. I was trying an app on my tablet with a Bluetooth controller, and it did have the option to remap buttons…except it had exactly as many necessary button mappings as the controller had buttons, plus an unnecessary “options” button (which I could just access with the tablet’s software buttons) that the app wanted to set to one of the buttons I was already using, with no way to unmap it. (The app ended up not working correctly on my tablet, so I didn’t have to deal with it for long, at least.)

In the same vein: a lot of mobile games with Bluetooth controller support don’t have button remapping, which would be fine, except for the various Bluetooth controllers out there that aren’t just knockoff Xbox 360/PlayStation/SNES controllers.

5

Even worse: When you turn down the resolution and the game scales down the fonts to make sure they’re still too small to read. (AI Wars)

Spreadsheet games with terrible spreadsheets. In Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI all the information in the game is available in the spreadsheets and you can choose which column to sort by. That’s a console game from 10 years ago. There is no excuse for Paradox’s failure to accomplish the same thing today.

6

Depth of field. Always give me an option to turn it off, and make the option separate from the other post-processing features.

8

Not being able to rebind keys, Instant un-install/refund.

9

Related, but more insidious to me: being able to rebind keys but some menus having hard bound keys that are nowhere to be found in the settings that fuck everything up. I’m looking at you Bethesda you assholes.

10

Yessss let the hate flow through you
more! More!

11

As long as we’re on the subject of Bethesda, how about not making me hit a sequence of multiple keys just to get my character sheet, quest list, etc. when I’m playing on the PC and have a whole keyboard in front of me?

12

when configuring a controller’s buttons, not being able to set the button by just hitting it.

On Annoyance #5- not being able to alf-F4 in competitive games can stop folks from ragequitting.

13

This pisses me off constantly in ETS/ATS. Every single thing I need to is bound to something on my gamepad. Except for “leave pause menu”, for which I either have to move the cursor slowly across the screen to click on the button, or fumble for my escape key peering through the gap in my VR headset.

14

  • I hate this so much. I appreciate space to let information breath but sometimes there’s so much room for more information that’s often a scroll or three off screen or buried somewhere else. The Witcher 2 was terrible for scrolling through lists unnecessarily.

  • Actually, while we’re at it, I hate it when things take up unnecessarily large amounts of the UI as well, nudging out more useful information. I’m playing Transistor at the moment and I feel like I’m constantly and awkwardly moving from screen to screen just to access basic information and yet there’s so much space and icons are so big. I remember getting annoyed with Breath of the Wild’s big grid icons for ingredients spread across multiple pages and recipes being a couple more button presses away still. I don’t need to see Link all the time on the right.

  • Another peeve, and it’s quite a subtle thing, but when you’re dealing with a mouse driven menu and the button to go back is all the way over the other side of the screen so you’re doing these unnecessarily broad motions just to dip in and out of submenus. No! Here’s a good example.

  • Don’t make me force Vsync from my Nvidia control panel eg. Nuclear Throne.

  • FOV set to something stupid like 60-70 by default on a PC game. Worse: not being able to adjust it in-game eg. Bioshock and Bioshock 2 (the original games).

  • Talking to NPCs numerous times until you’ve exhausted what they’re going to say and they start repeating themselves. Just stop fucking doing this games. STOP. Holy shit. Give me everything they’re going to say in one hit, or at the very least make it consistent. Fran Bow, I’m looking at you.

15

Ill second the FOV thing. Give us a slider. There is no reason not to.

I fucking hate scrolling through lists of items. Give me a grid to use. Even some console games, like DarkSouls uses grids for inventory. Lists are just lazy design.

I also have over-mapping keys that does like 5 different things, some of them incompatible with each other. Like mapping the space bar to go into stealth/cover OR to jump / vault over an object.

Not being able to re-map keys.

Not being able to climb. Humans are excellent climbers. There is no reason I can’t get on top of a crate that is only 4 feet high or pass over a short picket fence around a house or a billion other things.

Companion NPCs that block doors. Just make is so you can walk though your companions. The AI challenge of having them getting the fuck out of the way is beyond most game developers.

Romanceable female companions: If you are just a nice guy and talk to them, it will not be long before they are trying to ram their tongue down your throat. You have to be a total jerk to them, and even then, its probably best to not to even talk to them. I am looking at you bioware as the worst offender. I am playing ME1 right now and Ashley is stalking me.

16

Lack of proper 21:9 support.

17

Games as a Service.

18

@rei your first annoyance is also mine. If you have an Ultra setting, let’s just crank everything up so I don’t have to pick Ultra and then tweak every fucking setting to ensure it’s actually maximum.

Which ties into your fifth annoyance/question - PLEASE stop with setting that spin over from Ultra to Low. Make it hard stop at the end of both spectrums. Especially if I have to “click” to change the setting, rather than pick from a drop down list.

Almost all the stuff in your post drives me nuts, too. I can understand some of them (like the third one, where a console only developer is trying their hand for the first time at porting a game, though it’s far less forgivable when it’s a veteran developer of multiple platforms) and others I don’t think I’ve run into (number 11) but I empathize all the same.

I think for me as someone that likes to do stuff with my other display, the biggest issues for me relate to your 5th annoyance, though to take it a step further I want alt-tab to just let me get my task bar back and leave the game up (not minimized) so I can look for something if I’m stuck and see the game is patiently waiting for me to get back to it. In fact, the ideal situation is games that do that but you can just move your cursor off the screen smoothly, usually borderless window modes. More games should work like that in 2017 and beyond, imo.

19

For me a big one right now is claiming to support 4k and then not scaling your UI/text to match the new resolution. This seems especially common with MMOs for some reason. Some of them have manual settings to then go and adjust every little individual UI piece but I want that to be for tweaking defaults that are already more or less appropriate for the resolution, not something I have to mess with just to get the game playable. And certainly fucking not individually on every element.

20

My biggest pet peeve right there. CD Projekt gets an A+ for allowing everything to be skipped in Witcher 3. With other publishers users have to go rename or delete the introductory company logo movies but if you’re on console you have to take the pain like that scene from Platoon with Tom Berenger.

21

Imagine my surprise when I found myself unexpectedly banging the gothy witch like 6 hours into DA:O. I thought we were talking about reagents or some shit and suddenly we’ve skipped straight to bumpin uglies!

I don’t mind romanceable companions, and have even enjoyed it in a couple of instances (Tali comes to mind). But let’s have some love for platonic relationships, too, man; I find it really weird when banging is the natural endpoint/max level for every relationship.