What are some of the most annoying and enjoyable things in games?

[PandaLulz]

Question is simple really,

What aspects of these games do you find annoying and what are some aspects that you enjoy the most?

Such as;
- In RPGM games there's a lot of travel time
- Going in and out of a certain areas to 'farm talismans' for money.
- Maybe a game has too much management and not enough pay off, too much reading?
- Typical tropes of dumb young sister, older punk sister
+ Games that have consequence to your actions
+ Games that utilize great camera work and render detail
- Button mashing 'events' that require you to keep a meter high to get 'stealth'

Very interested to see your thoughts, maybe we can build a collective list.

 

[Jdog765]

bad combat is my pet peeve like make it good or scrap it

 

[iwanttoddownloadgames]

DAily quests, omg.

 

[Goku_Blackish]

I think this is going to be different for many different people but you covered some good points. I have a few "pet peeves" when it comes to different engines.

RPGM:
- When there is a large map but no content for the area. ( at least make it so I'm not wasting my time )
- Dialog that doesn't add to the game in any way. ( You may want to build up lore for your game like LOTR, but you already lost me)
- Travel times ( Just taking too long to get to different areas )
- Re-tracing steps ( If one mission has me go from one area to another area back to the same area then back to the other area, stop wasting my time )
- I don't mind some "farming" but if I have to end up farming for over 10-20 min for a few lewd renders, it's not worth it.
- This is one of the biggest things I hate about RPGM in general, most people make it hard to play with one hand...

I need more coffee.

 

[Honeycrust]

First thing that pops in my head are frequent and long load times. Hate them so much. Some games still have them for some reason.

Not sure how there's still load times with PCs being so powerful with so many threads and most PC's having a ton of free ram yet games not using them to reduce or eliminate load times.

 

[gunderson]

Ah, this old chestnut.

Annoying shit list:
Step/landlady/roommate/adopted/whatever other 'let's pretend it's incest but not really!' bullshit that people try these days. Real incest (in a video game, obviously. Patches are A-okay if done decently well) only please.

Visual novels. Like, almost any visual novel at this point. Yeah, I get it. Bunch of people like VNs. That's great. I'm bored to tears of them, especially the ones with no gameplay, no original ideas, the same harem archetype ladies that show up in every VN, and that depend entirely on translation programs for their English. At a certain point I just want to ask the people who make these: what makes you special? Why does this thing you threw together with stolen assets, spelling errors, and zero talent deserve my money?

Awful 3D open world Unity games. Honestly, I don't even try these anymore.

Every fucking time I see an ambitious game with a risky premise either get shut down or, worse, re-write their content without a patch to fix the shit Patreon pulled.

Good stuff:
Incest games! I'm so very glad that there are many incest games being made, even if most of them are shit. There are enough good ones that it's really not a bad time to be alive and an incest fetishist, assuming you don't like comics or stories about incest (if you do, it's kinda a fucking terrible time to be an incest fetishist).

People who take a risk and make a new kind of game. Honestly, there are a lot of cool new games out there I never expected to see. Games like Free Cities (technically it's now Pregmod because that game hasn't been in development for a while, in large part due to Patreon being prudes), its spiritual successor Stationmaster (recently finished! Interestingly, the dev behind that seems to have had a hiccup with a corporation-themed control game that's now been replaced by a fantasy thing called...Rise of the Exalted? We'll see), The Company, Bimbo Life Coach, and...well, a bunch of games that either got too ambitious or kinda stopped existing for whatever reason. Still, bunch of cool shit that only exists because people were willing to try.

People are starting to make more games with IRL porn star images again! I don't have a big problem with 3D stuff (unless it's Honey Select. Then, eww), but there's still something special about actual pictures of actual gorgeous ladies.

Hope! Yeah, maybe this is a minor thing, but I'm just generally happy that I can always expect that sometime within the next month there will be some cool/weird new shit to try. That's rad.

All told, I think this is a good time to be a porn gamer, even if it's a little less exciting than before the pornocalypse over at Patreon headquarters when they started crackdowns over fictional sex that fictional characters were having. So scawwy.

 

[loveolust]

-daily quests
-large areas with no hidden treasures/bosses/quests/anything
-a moe overload

 

[rk-47]

multiple open storylines i.e do this = you wont be able to get these quests/storylines vice versa, it makes the game replayable sure but its not like ng+ exists with rpgm porn games, renpy on the other hand will never have these issues much because of how easier it is to save and such

i do love however when you are in an area and only like 10% of it is explorable and the rest gets unlocked the more you progress the story, i played a really bad rpgm where everything was just open and i had no idea what i needed to do

 

[Stretta]

Arbitrary stat grinds to lewd a female protagonist. Having a sex life doesn't make a woman "corrupt." Male protags never have to do this bullshit, so stop it.

 

[Laikhent]

It bothers me when, in a harem game, to continue progressing with a certain character (that you like), you are forced to progress with another one (that you are not interested).

 

[Loganfin]

- A very young looking, skinny male MC who's shorter than most of the women
- A completely linear story that gives me no choice as to what I do next or who I interact with
- Being forced into BDSM content. If its a major part of the game, then I just don't play the game. But its frustrating when the game mostly focuses on something else, and then jams that in there without the ability to avoid it.
- Any game that forces a timeline, and/or has a system where you need to accomplish the goal within a limited amount of time. Please, let me do it at my own pace!
- Anything where a "game over" is possible if you make the wrong choice

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+ Maps! Please, please give me a map! It can be as simple as the female characters faces on squares, but let me choose my own path to some extent. Don't railroad me into one linear story. Maps help me keep track of what I'm doing, and the ability to do it at my own pace is huge.
+ Character cards! Very much of the same idea. Let me see all of the details about who is who. And in really good games, unlock things on the card as I go, with a gallery/video player.
+ A hint system. Enough said.
+ A corruption system that simply makes the women more horny and lowers their inhibitions as you go. That's awesome, but I have no desire to turn them into my slaves or just objects.
+ A male MC who's completely on board and excited about with having sex with every female character in the game, but who understands that the "long game" is best, and that he needs to treat them all with respect and earn their affections.
+ Female characters who are either sexually aggressive on their own, or who can be "unlocked" to become that way.
+ Impregnation as an ultimate payoff at the end of a female character's storyline.
+ Casual nudity, including the male MC. I love earning the comfort of the female characters to the point of them be cool with us just hanging out naked together, and the MC showing off his body, especially if it gets them excited.

 

[Blatant Wizardry]

In general, I detest unskippable cutscenes and tutorials. When it comes to games that may be made in certain engines, like RPG Maker and Unity, I outright abhor asset flips. And Unreal Engine I just avoid like the plague because for some reason it almost always causes my computer to BSOD.

Also I don't like early access as a concept but at the same time hey, I don't mind beta testing a game so long as it's enjoyable. I've done beta testing numerous times throughout the years - pro bono, mind you - and have actually been a help with a couple games in particular.

Finally, if the business model in a F2P game is gachapon, I'm going to drop it like a hot potato because I despise that model like nothing else. It's addictive and serves to make players into addicts. Sure, cute girls are cute, fun things are fun, but if you're spending $9001 just to get one character then perhaps you need to seek addiction treatment counseling. Just my opinion.

 

[Erneiros]

- A daily life that keeps repeating without any variation, but you have to do it for the grind.
- Linear stories.
- Stories / games without actual choices that matter.
- Being able to cum 3 times in a single scene.
- Stories where you get continuously 2 choices, the wrong and the right one. And then find out almost at the end that you can't get the good scenes because you made 1 or 2 wrong choices along the way.

 

[InCompleteController]

Things that I've had issues with:

A heavy reliance on RNG:
It's no fun to spend time an effort on something, only for the stars to not align and screw you over. That just encourages save scumming.
I get why it is used, but devs need to create a lower (and maybe upper) bound for luck in order for their games to stop feeling like a casino.

Forced wait time:
I've really only seen one game abuse this, but my god I got furious when I found out the reason for the game being so slow was because there was 1-2 seconds of forced delay during scene transitions. I get that it looks cinematic, but it gets tedious really fast if you have to sit through it hundreds of times.

Lack of save compatibility:
I get it, things change with every version so sometimes so players can't expect to always start from where they left things off in the previous version. That said, try to preserve as much progress as possible with every version of the game and don't just let the player start from scratch every. single. time.
At some point the game just becomes too large and I reach boredom before ever getting to any of the new stuff.

Lack of hints:
Big games are awesome as there's a lot to see and a lot to do. However, there is such a thing as becoming overwhelmed with decisions that just burns you out. Give the player a hint on how to get started.
Likewise, with big games it can be difficult to remember what you have and have not done, not to mention that players might not know what is possible.

Hidden objects:
Nothing is worse than realizing that you've been stuck because you just didn't realize you could click on something. Try using different styles, or maybe just outlines, for objects that can be interacted with.

Game over screens:
Bonus points if there's no actual game over screen, but the game just throws you back to the main menu. Bonus bonus points if I got to it through moon logic. There's nothing quite like realizing you now have to start over because you, and certainly not the game, didn't bother to save before making a bad decision.
If you want to have a bad ending for fun, just dump the player back before they made the wrong choice afterwards. That would make me want to hunt for them rather than fear them.

Perfect score required:
I understand games where you either get girl A or B depending on your score. However, in some games you end the game by simply choosing between A and B and none of your previous choices mattered. That is to say, if you scored perfectly then you will get the harem ending!
On paper this sounds good, in reality it simply means that the player should always choose the perfect response as picking anything else will just mean fewer choices at the end. Nothing drains the fun out of a game like trying to figure out if you missed out on a few points when choosing something.

 

[Deleted member 2466386]

Level Grinding, especially the default RPGMaker combat system.

 

[Pretentious Goblin]

Speaking of RPGM, a lot of games have this really annoying thing with the text system where you're pressing the button to make the text appear instantly (because for some godforsaken reason, so many devs don't use instant text, you have to wait for it to crawl into existence or press a button to display it instantly) and then a choice comes up, which causes you to inadvertedly select the first option. At least Ren'Py usually allows you to set text to instant. Not always an option on RPGM, only if the dev thought to include it.

Also annoying:

QTEs
False choices ("but thou must!", sometimes even with a Game Over if you don't)
RNG. The only place I want RNG is in procedural generation. Keep it out of my actions, please.
Long-ass non-interactive intros.
Long-ass non-interactive tutorials. That's just bad game design, pure and simple.
Sex scenes I never asked for, unless they're part of the core premise of the game.
"Raped until she enjoys it" trope. That's really not how that works, I don't know why this persists.
Massive dicks and tits being the norm.

 

[GreenGobbo]

Bad:
Quick time events. All of them. Every quick time event in any game ever.
Most are pointless and annoying. The rest are just dumb and annoying.

Stat grinding. This just creates artificial limitations on the player's autonomy by integrating a forced bottleneck.
Hell, most games with stat grinding are using it to intentionally slow the player's progress while padding out the play time so they can claim something that is actually 2 hours is really 10 to 15 long. (Just throwing out random numbers to illustrate my point.) Fact is, if you take away the stat grind and refocus that time instead on making more scenes or assets for another part of the production then your game might have a shorter total length, but it will have even more content overall.
Plus there are other ways you can get the players to spend more time in your game. Hell add in an extra location filled with optional and repeatable mini-games like a fair-ground or a casino.

 

[Loganfin]

Bad:
Quick time events. All of them. Every quick time event in any game ever.
Most are pointless and annoying. The rest are just dumb and annoying.

Stat grinding. This just creates artificial limitations on the player's autonomy by integrating a forced bottleneck.
Hell, most games with stat grinding are using it to intentionally slow the player's progress while padding out the play time so they can claim something that is actually 2 hours is really 10 to 15 long. (Just throwing out random numbers to illustrate my point.) Fact is, if you take away the stat grind and refocus that time instead on making more scenes or assets for another part of the production then your game might have a shorter total length, but it will have even more content overall.
Plus there are other ways you can get the players to spend more time in your game. Hell add in an extra location filled with optional and repeatable mini-games like a fair-ground or a casino.

I've seen a number of people use the term "Quick Time Events", but I don't really grasp what that means. When I think of Quick Time, I think of the old Apple video player, but I'm guessing that's not what you're meaning here.

 

[GreenGobbo]

I've seen a number of people use the term "Quick Time Events", but I don't really grasp what that means. When I think of Quick Time, I think of the old Apple video player, but I'm guessing that's not what you're meaning here.

A Quick Time Event (or QTE) is a fast paced mini-game where you have a limited amount of time to press a button, click something on screen, or make other form of interaction in an extremely limited amount of time.

A few examples:

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You must be registered to see the links

 

[Loganfin]

A Quick Time Event (or QTE) is a fast paced mini-game where you have a limited amount of time to press a button, click something on screen, or make other form of interaction in an extremely limited amount of time.

A few examples:

You must be registered to see the links

You must be registered to see the links

OK, thank you for that info. And I agree, I almost never like those.