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What things in gaming do you not agree with or do not like that the general audience enjoys?
Of course no one likes microtransactions (I feel dirty for typing that), low-effort cash grabs, and all the funny stuff 'early access' games have done. Tell me about things that you're certain everyone but you likes, or maybe not even something you don't like but don't agree with.
I think that the hypersexualization of female characters (especially young female characters) is ridiculous and disgusting.
I used to think this was a non-issue until I actually paid attention to what the issue was. Your wording is right, it's hypersexualization. It's certainly not just video games, but developers sort of revel in it. The gaming world is very overwhelmed with males. Just take a look at Twitch and how many 'titty' streamers there are and how often they get away with more or less porn. It's accepted because it's just a bunch of men deciding what they want. Twitch needs to decide if it's a gaming site or a titty site.
I don't know if I necessarily agree that "titty streams" are a problem in that way; I think they're distasteful but I prefer them over pornographic video game characters. One is male developers catering to a male audience with female sexuality, and the other is a female using her own sexuality to appeal to a male audience.
It's not so much the titty streams themselves, I know they're just doing what they do to make money. I mean to say that the management of Twitch is of two minds which reflect the male driven ideologies surrounding sexualization of video games. The titty streamers don't get in trouble for the stuff they do while a male streamer who accidentally shows something vaguely sexual gets heavy handed punishment.
If that's the case, then I agree that that's bs and isn't fair at all, streamers should all be held to the same standards regardless of gender or quality of stream.
This Critikal video is a good primer on the situation.
I find it so annoying. I delayed playing NieR: Automata until just about a month ago because of the perception that 2B would be hypersexualized in it... turns out that's just the fandom. I was honestly surprised when the worst part in terms of sexualization was just her outfit.
I know it is a prominent issue, but maybe it's just the games I play - I can't think of any cases off the top of my head besides Final Fantasy XV's Cid and fighting game characters.
Do you have any specific examples?
Honestly, I am on the opposite side - I find it hard to think of ones that don't. Games like Minecraft, factorial, and GTO where people aren't part of the game play don't have it, but pretty much any RPG, FPS, and fighter games do. Even games like GTO that doesn't have hypersexualised women in the game, have it as part of their marketing.
Almost every female champion in League of Legends.
Zero Suit Samus, Sophitia and Ivy from Soul Calibur, Lara Croft, Sonya Blade, all of Dead or Alive, the loading screens in GTA, Tifa from FF7, Tracer from Overwatch, Lulu from FFX, Quiet from MGS, The Lady of the Forest from Dragon Age: Origins, Cia, from Hyrule Warriors, females in World of Warcraft, females in League of Legends, Cortana from Halo, Tekken 5, Lollipop Chainsaw, Bayoneta, Dragon's Crown, FFXIV, Star Ocean, and like a million more.
Aren't you kind of cherry picking a few of these? Morrigan in Dragon Age is a witch that seduces men into the forest and spirits them away. Her outfit kind of fits the bill, and anyways her outfit can change into whatever armor you want to put on her.
Bayonetta, well, that entire game is satirical hypersexualization. Hideki Kamiya also made Devil May Cry which hypersexualizes the shit out of Dante, too. It's the point of both series.
And I wouldn't exactly say Cortana is a prime example, she's a holographic AI based off of a woman. She has a full figure for sure, though. But then you approach an argument of whether or not its pro or anti-feminist to acknowledge and celebrate the body of a woman. Toning down her features is almost a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of thing. And I wouldn't necessarily say Cortana is at all sexualized other than the fact that she is "hot".
I don't really think that listing entire games from different genres is cherry picking, no.
Look at earlier Halo games and more recent ones, and it's clear that Cortana is more and more sexualize. She basically has nipples now. I never even mentioned Morrigan, and while I agree that Bayonetta could've originated as satire she's come all the way back around by this point and is just ridiculous again.
What about the rest?
If your mention of celebrating the body of a woman is a reference to my other comment about certain kinds of female streamers on twitch, the difference is that those woman are using their own sexuality to appeal to men while the characters are created by men to appeal to men. Why is it a problem for a woman to use her own sexuality but it isn't an issue when others create an overly sexual female to appeal to male gamers?
I'll admit I haven't played Halo since Reach, so I wouldn't know what all they've gotten up to since then. I agree that Cortana was changed further and further over time, though, so I can see your point.
As for Morrigan, I must have assumed you were referring to her. I remember her being referred to as The Witch of the Forest or something to that effect in the earlier parts of the game. But now I see who you're referring to. For that, I can understand, but at the same time it's another one of those things where it's hard to draw the line between what is sexualization and what is attempting to ape a renaissance-like "nature and womanliness" thing. Definitely less tasteful, though, so I may be with you there.
As for celebrating the body of a woman, I don't mean to reference Twitch streamers, but simply their depiction in certain aspects of gaming. It's one of those flip-side issues where on one hand sexualizing a woman is demeaning but on the other their agency over their bodies is also empowering. The fact that men are making these things for men provides a different perspective of looking at it that has to be dealt with, and I do think the industry has a cultural onus of doing things because it's just the way they've always been done.
My point of contention about "cherry picking" isn't to say that I think there's no issue of sexualizing females in video games. Quite the opposite, in fact. I agree that there is an issue, but I do think there is a method to the madness. Sexualizing women can be both demeaning and empowering, and it all depends on the context of why and for what reason it is occurring. In most games it's simply for the male gaze, but in others there is reasoning that should be considered and noted.
I only listed the games I knew offhand, I play more Japanese games than anything else. I didn't really have the time to research more Western games last night, but I might do so tonight.
I'll admit to not having played many of those games. Quiet I just blocked out of my memory because of how terrible that character was.
I wouldn't really put Samus or Lara Croft in that category nowadays. They've made strides to keep Lara grounded and if ZS Samus' outfit is considered hypersexualised, then so should these - they're both skin-tight spacesuits.
I don't like how it's OPEN WORLD EVERYTHING nowadays. I have played a lot of good linear games, and a lot of good open world games. However, a lot of games are open world now that frankly shouldn't be.
I feel like I saw a video that discussed this recently, all these games with opens worlds that just don't need them, and they're all just empty because they built the world but not the content.
Edit: it might have actually been a dunkey video, now that I think of it.
Prime example: Metal Gear Solid V.
Even if it were finished, the world would still be barren besides the occasional guard post.
I found this to be very very true in Mirrors edge: catalyst. Apart from all the other problems with that game, the open world nature of it was just cumbersome and frustrating. It was both devoid of side missions except for glorified time trials, and was pretty visually boring too....
I feel a big problem with open world focused design causes worlds to feel a little empty, shallow, or hollow. It's my main gripe with Breath of the Wild. I love the game. But because Ninty really wanted to focus on the expanse of the world a lot of tried and true Zelda tropes fell majorly by the wayside. I get that they wanted more freedom with stage and item progression but I feel like they went a little too far in that direction. What they should have done to give the players more freedom was make it like A Link between Worlds how you didn't need to do the dungeons in a specific order or with a particular item. Also the story and primary dungeon design and frequency suffered greatly because of the open world focus. Towns were almost non existent and ghostly, with stables and random wandering NPC's trying desperately to fill the gap. In the same vein, the shrines were all the same palette and cookie cutter form trying to distract the player from the lackluster Divine Beasts.
To me, it's games that are always very competitive, with a lot on the line. There are people for whom CS:GO or Overwatch is their main game. For me, I don't think I could handle that. For the most part, I prefer games that are relaxing, or at least let me choose my own pace for the action. Sitting down for an evening of Cities: Skylines is much more relaxing for me than playing Overwatch, and in some cases I would even call Overwatch a stressful experience for me.
I totally agree.
I remember finally giving League of Legends a try some years ago, and I found that I didn't like it that much. Most of the big MOBAs out there are great games with amazing design and a ton of hardwork put into them. They are very nuanced , and I would say that making a good competitive game is likely the most difficult task imaginable. Valve took a hard step with Dota 2 but they managed to do it, and I was surprised.
My issue with LoL was that I didn't find it fun. It felt like work instead of a video game. I felt like I had to work to learn things about the game and the characters in it. On top of that, I was constantly judged by my performance. Most popular gaming communities are pretty toxic, but I think that went doubly so for LoL when I played it. Literally someone who had started playing the game the day before was cursing at me about how bad I was in my literal first game ever.
That also goes for competitive FPSes as well. I think Overwatch is great, but every time I play I feel like I'm the only person who isn't playing all day, everyday.
Have you tried Heroes of the Storm? It's Blizzard's version of the LoL/Dota style of games, and they got rid of a lot of the more "hardcore" aspects of it. There are definitely still people that take it way too seriously, but a lot fewer than in the other games. The games are usually only 15-20 minutes long, there's no last-hitting or some of the other really annoying mechanics, "builds" are far less emphasized, etc.
I haven't had a chance to play for a while now, but I was really enjoying it for a while. It still gives me the feeling of playing LoL/Dota, but with way less of the "keeping up with this game is like a second job" aspect.
Agreed. Hots is just so much more chill because it relies on player skill and not a million different small things you have to do or you instantly lose.
Agreed. I've been weening off of LoL, and giving HotS a try. Much more relaxed!
A friend of mine got me to play Heroes of the Storm because she was getting into it at the time. I agree that it's easier to play. I might play it more if she was still playing, or if I knew anyone who played. I certainly like it a lot more than the other mobas, so maybe I'll give it another shot.
Thanks!
It didn't take long for me to be sadly sitting in the fountain hoping the other team would just finish the round already to make me lump HotS in with Dota2 and LoL.
I think the game feeling like work gets to part of it for me, but maybe not the whole thing. When I was very young I failed to finish a lot of games because I would reach a bossfight and be afraid to lose. I know now that most games don't punish you much for failure, so I've gotten much better about this. However the aspect in competitive games where you are punished for failure (losing ranks or whatever) doesn't appeal to me much. Maybe ranked play just isn't for me.
I think I get that. I also don't want to play a game where I constantly lose. I do enjoy playing games online every now and again, and I'm not afraid to say that I'm never anywhere near the top, but getting good at some games is work. There is so much to know and learn in all of the big mobas that it's not worth the effort.
Ranked play isn't for me either, because that is honest-to-goodness work.
I think ranked play is alright, so long as you can continue to progress with unranked play. An example for me is Clash Royale. I played a bit when the game came out, about two years ago now, but gave up on it. I have recently gotten back into it because they have an unranked 2v2 mode that I can play to keep progressing without risking my rank.
I definitely agree on the second point. I used to play Overwatch a lot and had to stop because it just made me too salty.
Competitive ruined the game for my group of friends and I. It was a lot of fun before then but some in the group were much more serious about their standings than others but everyone was insistent on playing competitive, especially since quick match was so bad for some time after Comp came out.
Clicking to move your character in MOBAs. I get that its a hold over from when the genre was a mod to rts games, but please, let me move my character with wasd.
Tutorials. Pop up hints. Expository menu systems in general. Every time I go back and play older games, they do nothing to explain anything to you. They just assume you've read the manual. I think there's something to be said for this style of design, as in some way learning the game's mechanics via actual play rather than having it spelled out for you creates a far more rewarding output than most tutorial levels.
A game in particular that I think is like poetry for game design is Knock-Knock. That game takes the concept of learning by playing to the extreme. There's no manual, no tutorial, just gameplay. You barely understand what's happening, but neither does your character. You're an insane insomniac that awakes in the middle of the night to a knocking at your door. Lights go on and off throughout your house, you hear voices, creatures come and go without much logic or explanation. There are rules to the game but you're tasked with trying to figure them out for yourself, but that's the whole point. The game wants you as confused and paranoid as the character by just simply trying to play it. It's amazing. It's what games are supposed to be when they push the boundaries of the medium as an art form.
More games need to take risks and put the onus on their players.
I recently started playing a game called Shelter 2 and it gives almost zero direction. It's a PC game, so occasionally it explains what some obscure button does (particularly the one that brings up the map) but it literally starts with the player in full control and nothing explained at all.
Escape Goat 2 has a great introductory series of levels which use the Mega Man X method of tutorials, which is just actual gameplay that makes everything clear to the player in a practical manner instead of lengthy prose.
I will say that people who do play a lot of games might be a bit jaded by this topic. Any video game can be someone's first video game and hints and tips help out those people. Gamers might think "I don't need a stupid arrow to tell me where to go" while a less game literate person might say "Thanks, I got totally turned around after that firefight." There is some merit to hand holding, but I'll agree that sometimes it's a bit too heavy.
Perhaps the worst instance of this is in Bethesda games like Fallout 3 and Oblivion where the quest arrow blinds the player from the world around them. hbomberguy's video Fallout 3 Is Garbage, And Here's Why does a great job of flaying this idea apart. It's a long video, but anyone interested in video game design should give it a watch.
I won't say that tutorials are inherently a bad thing, but there is a balance to them. In my opinion a game should either naturally infuse the tutorials into their environment (like many older games as well as many newer games) or make it an optional experience, either as an alternate option on the menu or a settings toggle if the tutorials appears in popups.
Of course, when something can be taught naturally it should, but there are cases where all of a game's mechanics can't be taught naturally. Many fighting games and RPGs for example, have a hard time of teaching their player the basic controls and mechanics without using popup menus, and as long as these can be disabled so they don't get in an experienced players way, I don't take issues with them. What I do take issues with however, is a game using these popup menus and other "lazy" tutorial methods when more natural methods can be used.
I don't mean to be rude but... Which game "of the past" you played that where having tutorial?
Because I remember games with manual and even today I go to the option ->keybind as first thing because I'm not sure it'll be taught to me once I start the game :D
Most games didnt necessarily say tell you what their mechanics were, but the first few levels usually taught them to you. Basically every element of Super Mario Bros. (But swimming) is taught within the first world through smart game design, for examplw
I prefer single player games. There, I said it.
That's not to say I hate multi-player games, or don't ever play them (I played the shit out of ESO and spent many, many years in the MUD scene).
For me it's about 2 things: I prefer co-op, and it is REALLY FUCKING HARD to find people to play co-op with at the random times I have to play games in the first place. I think if I had a twin physically attached at the hip, and we both finished work and study at exactly the same times and such, I would be able to enjoy co-op games the way I want to. Or if I had a co-op game-playing slave.
Side note: does anyone want to be my co-op game-playing slave? The pay is shit and the conditions are worse, but your job description has the word game in it.
Haha! I totally get this.
When I was a younger man in college, I played co-op games with my buddies all the time. We had so much free time with no job and the first few years of college basically being a repeat of all of high school, all we did was play video games. Now as adults with jobs, bills, kids, and whathaveyou we don't have the time anymore.
I understand totally.
I'm trying to teach my teenager son how to play coop but he's already ruined by fucking mobile games or games like Skylanders (1 button does everything).
This past weekend I had him sit and play Wizard of Legend with me (I bought an Xbox controller just for him, I need only my trustworthy k&m) and I think he finally realised what real satisfaction is when he managed not to die in 5 minutes for the first time and complete a level with me.
Parenting achievement I suppose.
My biggest "issue" is still many game devs still developing only for Windows, even though most major frameworks support both Mac and GNU+Linux by default as well. There's no technical reason to develop solely for Windows, yet it's still the norm for AAA games it feels like.
I honestly believe that Vulkan is going to change this, but it's still very new.
The reason why most devs only develop for Windows is money. Not that it costs less money to develop for Windows, but most devs don't know hot to use the tools required to develop on other operating systems. A lot of people know x86 and DirectX, which is what's brought console gaming so close to PC gaming now. Before now, OpenGL was the only option for developing on Linux and MacOS and it's just not as good or well known. That's starting to change. It started with Mantel and that became Vulkan.
Vulkan is the future. I'm really hoping that more games come to Linux because I cannot stand all of Microsoft's bullshit. I hate having to use Windows on my machine.
I certainly agree with your sentiment. I think the turn system in FFX is really great and clear and sort of skirts up against that real time aspect without going over the line. I don't like the idea of having to rush my decisions because I'm afraid the enemy will attack first. The turn-based system is all about strategy, not quick thinking.
A number of years ago when Starcraft came out, strategy game enthusiasts scoffed at the idea of a real-time strategy game. They would contest that games like Civilization and other Turn-based Strategy games were the real strategy games and stuff like Starcraft was for dummies. Of course today there are many fans of both types of games, but they're distinct from one another. It would be very annoying if other people could take turns while I make a strategy in Civilization.
The newer Civ games (or at least Civ 5, I don't know if 6 has it as well) do actually have this. There's a setting you can toggle that allows players to take simultaneous turns. With it on, all the players go at once, and once all of them have ended their turns, the AI goes in traditional turns. If two players go to war, their turns get split up so it's more properly turn-based.
I remember from Civ IV being able to plan turns. That's a bit different from taking turns ahead of other player, and it makes sense to be able to do something while you sit and wait for other people to take their turn.
I've had this problem too for a long time, but I have to say I'm actually a fan of people at least trying to mix up the norms of gaming. When we limit ourselves to just one or the other gameplay style it just gets.... boring. I've played so many hundreds of games where it's just. same numbers with a new graphic. Games need innovation a lot of time, a new idea, a new hook so to speak. A lot of times that falls really flat.
Especially a lot of turn-based rpg's. It's the exact same sats, it's the exact same Rock Paper Scisssors boring combat. I figure out what's good enough and roll through and hope your story is enough to carry me.
An example of "turn based" mixed with realtime that I think actually worked well would be Faster Than Light. It is real time combat, but I play it as if it was turnbased.
A more recent example would be Pillars of Eternity 2. I imagine normal difficulties could be coasted through, but I played the harder difficulties them almost as if they were turn-based. Lots of pausing, timing actions and cooldowns. BUT, the advantage of not being forced turn-based meant that I didn't need to waste time telling my characters to do shit when the outcome was inevitable. They could just finish the encounter for me. Not wasting my time with useless actions is really important to me
There is a room for balance I think.
I played the first with the hope of finding a new baldur's gate and honestly finished it quite disappointed as the story felt ripe with tediously long dialogues but the plot being quite stereotyped and shallow excuse to drive me from combat to combat.
Now I know my perception is influenced by lots of factors (nostalgia, experience, age, expectations) so my question is: how does the 2nd installment is, compared to the first?
Thanks :)
You can fix that by setting the ATB system to "wait" - then all the ATB system does is visualise the turns. FFX did that quite well also.
FF13 did not, but at the same time got some other enjoyable aspects out of it - I find it to be a nice balance of complexity grown from simplicity.
But with wait you aren't planning around time. You're taking turns. The ATB is just a visual representation of who gets to take their turn next.
That's not what any good turn based system does. The ability to act faster than your opponent and potentially act twice between your opponent's actions is the hallmark of a good turnbased system. That is how FFX does it, and it's how turn based has worked since the days of pen and paper - though it can be termed confusingly, 2nd edition DnD for example has turns, rounds, speed factor, and APR, but at the end of the day it all boils down to the same thing. And it can be visualised, like we see in the Baldur's Gate series.
Nobody would argue that DnD isn't turn-based, but there you can swing your sword 10 times before your opponent has the chance to swing theirs once.
Gamers like a genre.
I really don't think they do.
Gamers may prefer a certain aspect of gameplay, but we are limited by developers chunking all of those into broad "genres"., Once a game gets lumped into a genre, there's very specific expectations of what this game now needs to have.
When I look at the gaming scene, the real standouts are things that defy genre. At least in my circles, we've all played so, so many games that when you make your "action rpg" or your "stealth fps" it's has just... no draw. I've played it before. I've crunched the same exact numbers. To use a racing analogy, my racing line through your game never changes. It's so clear what I'm supposed to do that I spend more time trying to break your game, avoiding that, then I do actually playing it as the devs intended.
The hard part for me to admit is: I have no solution. There's no easy answer to "I've seen this before, what else you got." It's not that the developers didn't work hard, it's that when you're stuck in the rut of making a game that needs to make profit, risks aren't worth it.
Someone above mentioned they don't like genre mixing, but I feel like that's honestly the next step. There's going to be a game that come along that lets someone play RTS, someone play twitch based physically demanding gaming (shooters in general, fps, top down shooters, bullet hell, etc) and a long strategy Civ'ish (but hopefully not terrible) diplomacy system.
It's the same mixture early mmos tried to tap in to. Everyone had a very specific job. Switching in game jobs meant you completely changed your gameplay.
People want jobs they are good at, and nobody is getting good at a job they fuckin hate when it comes to gaming. You can't force people into the shitty job unless the rest of it is worth it.
I think one answer to this is asymmetric play. The only example I really know of, other than what's in that video is Zombie Master (which might not be in development anymore?). I agree with you that we need more of these types of games, because they can bring together player groups that would not exist otherwise, and create really meaningful experiences.
Also, if you've never watched Extra Credits and you like games as a medium, they have hundreds of episodes just like the one I linked above.
I'mma post this but I felt like rewriting it after listening to the Extra Credits a second time. He does touch on exactly what I meant, but I I think I had a couple ok things to say outside that.
I'm very familiar with Extra Credit. I kinda hate their presentation (why the voice filters?), but it touches on exactly what I'm talking about.
In their TF example (being specific) it focuses on approaches in that format. I think there's more room than that. Games like Mass Effect touched on it (remember wandering around those awful planets looking for nothing important?) but they get short changed.
Games are expensive and trying to do too much is always a success for doing too little everywhere..
Ideas like asymmetric play are exactly what I want. A game where you have multiple gameplay different approaches to the same problem.
I think a game just needs to take it a step farther. It isn't easy to ask a nameless game studio to make 2 good games in the same space as their one good game. It's too much. But then again... your puzzle platformer doesn't break the genre. The community is starting to be filled by resume presentations.
Maybe everything falls under that criteria, but I'd bring up Undertale. That's a game that sits in its genre but pushes boundaries in way most people only expect a film to do. It doesnt break a traditional video game genre, but it does stess what I would consider the the normals genres for a video game story (if that makes sense).
I'd point to the Bethesda games as an example of a genre that hit this in the early stages. Morrowind in particular was a game that allowed you to focus on the twitch aspect (their actual fighting, even if it kind of sucked) dialogue and story, or strategy through crafting. Later games furthered the strategy by having the faction alter your gameplay further in some stories. It felt like the pieces tied together. I really wished they would have fleshed this out more. Mods did.
It was rough, and other games had aspects of this (Ultima series. Wasn't my cup of tea but I've played them now and appreciate them). It's just... a lot. You cant expect a studio to do everything. BUT
BUT. When I see a shooter now.... I kind of... just don't care. So many FPS games fall into this trap of their game needing to be me clicking. I'd point them towards the ARMA series. The stratefy of learnign the commands is more interesting to me than the pressing of the left mouse button cause I saw the bad pixel men.
I love a game with layers. People want to make games their hobby. Figuring out x does more damage than y, or x does double damage to z isn't fun. It's what I already expected so once I figure it out I no longer care.
This is exactly it, really. Every popular game, every good game is a crowd pleaser. On Reddit last week someone said that Dead Space and Dead Space 2 are golden example of Horror games. I disagree. I won't say that they aren't horror games explicitly, because they aim to be horror, but they're terrible examples of horror games. They have some elements of survival but there is no sense of danger. Playing Dead Space I feel like Iron Man. Dead Space 2 is, at best, an action thriller game with hints of horror.
Of course, on Reddit disagreeing with other people means a one-way ticket to downvote city so my comment was buried as quickly as I had typed it up. It's not like I don't like those games, I do, I just don't think they're Golden Examples of horror games. Minecraft is a better horror game.
Natural Selection (a mod for Half-Life) and its sequel Natural Selection 2 are examples of this. Maybe the first asymmetrical multiplayer game. One side plays as aliens who can 'evolve' into new and different forms, and the other side is space marines who can study and upgrade equipment. The marines also have a commander who plays from a top-down RTS perspective and he manages the team and designs building plans for the player to build from. It's a very interesting game, check it out.
MOBAs just don't do it for me. I've had a couple of friends try to get me into League or DOTA, and I just couldn't really get into it. I enjoy RTS games and MMOs, and there are plenty of games I like that have MOBA-esque mechanics, but I'm just not a fan of MOBAs themselves.
I think it's the combination of time commitment per match, steep learning curve, and notoriously toxic communities (at least for League and DOTA). Maybe if I spent more time trying to get into them, I'd come to enjoy them, but I don't have the motivation to do so.
Have you tried watching high-level competitive play?
I don't find playing the game enjoyable myself, for the same reasons you've listed, and I just don't have the time to get enough experience in the game to overcome that.
However I have found tournaments to be enjoyable to watch (with n00b commentary to explain general terms, items and plays) due to the high skill level & team cooperation.
Public ranking. It pressures players into "performing" rather than playing and taking risks. Ranking should only show up as experience or bracket placement, encouraging players to improve their playing rather than improving their stats.
For me, it's the Halo series.
It's been a long time since I've played any of them, but I did put a decent amount of time into Halo and Halo 2, and I spent a bit of time in Halo 3. I mostly played them because my friends were into it. I played Halo on PC, because I am a PC gamer, but the others were console releases so I haven't played them nearly as much.
I'll get to my point Halo is boring. By admission of the Development Team, the design is around the mentality of 30 Seconds of Fun. To me, that made the game feel like the same thirty seconds over and over again with slight variation. By the end of the game I felt like I had accomplished very little. I'm not calling Halo bad. It has merits, but not many. Most importantly, Halo isn't any better than the games that came before and after.
On PC at least, Unreal, Tribes, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and likely others did just about everything better than Halo. The downside is that all of those games are PC games, most of which never made it to console. Still, some did and they were still great. I'm baffled by how popular Halo has become. Like I said, I don't think it's outright bad. It's proficiently made with great graphics, sounds, generally balanced weapons, music, and level design, but none of that is better than the competition.
The worst contribution Halo has made is the 'chest-high wall' epidemic of auto-regen health. Halo's system is better than other games with its two layers of health, but it's still a little lazy. Instead of creating interesting terrain, a lot of level design in Halo is about pop-in, pop-out until everyone who isn't you is dead. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the two-player strategy of one player hanging back so the other can rush in over and over again.
Anyway, I'm hoping this topic can be civil. I know on Reddit I would get downvoted to hell and be called out as a troll for saying anything negative about Halo (or any number of other very loved games).
You can apply this same idea to modern PC and Console games. We all love Steam, but if you can't get online for a few days, it locks up and you can't play any games. Ubisoft is notorious for this 'always-on DRM' as it's called.
Of course no one likes this and it doesn't really apply to my initial question.
I hate controllers. Basically every console controller ever created since the original Nintendo has been shit. I liked arcade-style controllers where the joystick was large and easy to manipulate precisely with your fingers, and buttons for your other hand.
Today the best options seems to be mouse/keyboard. Joystick if it's that type of game, or steering wheel, if you're serious into driving games.
Can't stand handheld controllers. They just seem to make you control everything with your least dexterous fingers, your thumbs. Aiming with a thumbstick? Ick.
I can't stand consoles because their controls are just too much of a PITA, and are much less precise compared to computer-based games.
I know I'll get some hate for this. Sorry. I just can't stand consoles because of this.
I dislike when someone says a game is too linear. There are very few games that aren't linear, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Without some sort of direction, the game gets lost in "open world with nothing to do" territory, and I'd rather be stuck on rails than dropped in a sandbox with no toys.
Even if you consider some games that you can sequence break (Super Metroid, Dark Souls) you have progression check marks you have to hit before you can reach the next area. Every game is linear and that's not a valid critique.
Edit: Also I just realized I didn't answer the question correctly AT ALL so that's my bad lol
I don't think that every game should be open world, but I do think that a game can be "too linear". I don't necessarily mean that the game puts you on a straight path, however, but rather what a game lets me do. If a game places an object in its environment I expect that I should be able to interact with it in some way. If you create a wide open area filled with unique objects and characters but only allow me to explore and interact with it when you want me to, then I am actively fighting with the game itself. A game can be linear, but a linear game should still allow some degrees of freedom, as otherwise the game essentially ends up feeling like a movie with some quick time events.
I do agree that linearity is inherent in all forms of media. Even a game which is wide open like every Elder Scrolls game have linear progression in quest lines, armor, skills, and stories.
I will say that some games are uninteresting and linearity can be annoying. If I remember correctly, Final Fantasy XIII was literally a series of hallways. That's a bit silly. Still, being linear isn't a bad thing, but some linearity can detract from a game, especially if it's not a good game to start with. Feeling like there is only one way to accomplish a task can be uninteresting.
I'd say it would have to be the the overuse of microtransactions for trivial things such as skins. I get that its a personal decission if you choose to buy them but it's the developers fault for even including them.
Another example is how in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided you can buy weapons with real money that are superior to any of the ingame ones. It's just unfair to those who can't afford stuff like that and seeing as it's a singleplayer game that makes it even worse and unnecessary.
Shooty games.
I don't mind games with shooty elements like Far Cry, but I don't like CoD, battlefield, fortnite, overwatch, CSgo, etc..
For some reason I do like TF2, I don't know why...
For a shooty game, TF2 has remarkably less shooting than the rest. Maybe that's why you like it?
Probably, but it's the game that I played in high school with friends, and anything's fun with friends. I don't know anyone who plays the shooty games of today.