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

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.

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.

  • 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.

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.

Lack of proper 21:9 support.

Games as a Service.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

Space sims that don’t have simple targeting commands, like “Target closest enemy.”

Not having borderless window as a display option. That is all.

Well, RPS raised some interesting points in their Do and Don’t lists for PC games…

eg

DO let me run the game in a window.
DON’T force me to set difficulty levels at the start of the game, and then refuse to allow me to change it.
DON’T ask me if I’m sure about every single thing I do. Again, here I ultimately want the psychic detection systems in place, so games can only ask me this when I have somehow clicked to close the game instead of return to it, and not when I haven’t, but again I’m exhibiting unusual levels of tolerance here in allowing intermediary measures.
DO allow me to make as many saves as I wish, until my HDD is full. My PC, as much as it may frighten you, is not a Sega Dreamcast.
DO let me pause cutscenes.
DON’T make it difficult for me to quit.
DO make your “RESUME” button be in the same place as you “BACK” button on all menus.

I’m going to have to strongly disagree with this one, at least in certain circumstances. If I choose to play on a higher difficulty level I had to unlock by completing the game, make me commit to that. If clearing the game on Very Hard unlocks some special bonus for future playthroughs and your game still has the option to change difficulty level mid-game, absolutely don’t give that reward to someone who played on Very Hard for five minutes and then dropped down to Normal for the rest of the game.

Nah, that’s not really a disagreement. The obvious correct implementation there is to let you adjust the difficulty at will, but grant rewards at the end based on the lowest difficulty used at any point in the playthrough.

I want to have to work and develop mastery and earn my victories, but I also don’t want to get stuck five hours in with no option but to restart from the beginning. Knowing that I can drop the difficulty down if needed gives me the freedom to start on hard and enjoy the game more.

ledShok took mine!

This is less of a problem these days. Mostly older games.

-japanese console to pc ports that use weird-ass random keyboard letter keys for select/cancel instead of space/enter and arrow keys

Those weird-ass letter keys are what they use for standard over there and have done so for years.

I mean, Z and X aren’t weird. What’s weird is when you run into a game where half the keys are mapped across the keyboard and the numpad and such. I ran into that just the other day with the Steam version of Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code.

The Borderless Gaming app on Steam works for a lot of games, but it’s not perfect (or at least, some games ‘fight’ its efforts).