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What irrational video game requirements do you have?
For me it's bunny hopping. If I can't sail across a map at 100km/h in an FPS, it'll be very difficult for me to get into it. I get that I'm missing out on a lot of good games, but normal movement just feels so empty and slow.
For those who don't know what bunny hopping is, it's a mechanic in primarily FPS games where you jump repeatedly instead of walking/running. This allows you to move much faster and pull off some complex manoeuvres.
Anyway I'm curious to see if others have admittedly ridiculous requirements like this.
It's not really irrational but it's an immediate dealbreaker for me: lack of pause in a single player game. I have things in my actual life that will always take priority over playing a game. I also strongly dislike the feeling of losing progress or time. If I'm going to get killed by random things in your game because the doorbell rings, it's not for me.
Yes, this one is really annoying. Also, games that require you to play 1h+ to get to another save point.
Any attempt to exert control over my real life, or enforce in-game consequences for real-life actions is a dealbreaker for me.I don't have much free time, like most people, so a game has to be able to squeeze into the precious gaps I can carve out for it, not vice versa.
This killed Pacific Drive for me. I really wanted to pick it up, but hours between save points and no Save & Quit completely put me off of it.
I've been trying to pinpoint why I haven't come back to Pacific Drive after playing it initially, and I think this might be it. It's hard enough to find the time to play without it being some mandatory base commitment of time that I won't know up front.
I was super disappointed to find it out. I was actually hovering over the buy button, but then checked the negative reviews and saw that it didn't even have a Save & Quit option and just had to nope out. I am similar in that I generally have no idea how much time I will have to game, so I tend to play stuff in 10-20 minute chunks, sometimes longer if maybe my kids are in bed (but this isn't foolproof.)
Handhelds have been a godsend for this. Around the time I oldest was born in 2017, I started getting into handhelds more aggressively without even thinking about why. But I've been examining it more lately and figured out this is why; I can't sit at my desk all day anymore to game, so it's nice to be able to break it up into little chunks I can just suspend. Pacific Drive might have even been in my running if it worked ok on Deck, but it was pretty crap as far as performance went with the Demo.
Ha, same story for me but about 6 years earlier. I relied heavily on my DSlite for my gaming, and one of the console's main features was the idea of "close the lid and come back to it later". No matter the game, I could just suspend at any time and come back later, so I ended up having the courage to try a lot of games and found quite a few gems.
Oh yes, that's a tough one for me too. Sometimes mitigated if it's an old enough game for emulation with save states, but yeah otherwise major negative points.
Completely agree. It's another example where it just feels lazy at best, or at worst, 'you have to use our online servers so you can always potentially make impulsive purchases from the in-game shop, and soooo.... no pausing for you! ... it's for... immersion? Yeah, immersion!'
I agree with this, but more important that Pause for me is Save & Quit. I don't mind a lack of Pause in Elden Ring or Dark Souls, etc, but that's because I can Save & Quit the game anytime.
In fact, I would say S&Q is more important to me, because when I have to get up and attend to a thing, I'm usually not coming back immediately, possibly for a few hours or even the rest of the day and I'd rather not leave the game running during that time.
Probably one of the main reasons I prefer to play games on PS5 (besides having a 10-year-old video card) is the ability to suspend pretty much any game by putting the console in sleep mode, then picking up exactly where I was when I turn it back on.
Also an advantage on the Switch. I often use the home button instead of the pause button at this point.
I largely despise crafting in games. I'll go along with the get X, Y, and Z to make this piece of gear, but if a game puts "crafting" anywhere in the gameplay description I generally skip it entirely because I know it'll be some multi-step crafting crap that'll be necessary for gameplay and it simply isn't fun. The crafting bit leads into my hard limit requirement:
No fishing.
I have a seething hatred for fishing mini-games and little gets me to uninstall and refund a game faster than requiring me to fish.
I don't mind crafting if it fits in the game. There are just too many games that have crafting when it doesn't even remotely belong.
I 100% agree with you on the fishing mini-games though, can't stand them.
Crafting is fine if it's a mechanic to gate the better weapons from the player (Like in the new Lara Croft games).
But if I specifically need to go hunt for 42 tigers to be able to carry over 5 arrows, go pound sand, devs.
Yeah, it’s the difference between crafting and grinding. If you have to grind for hours to gather the ingredients to craft a simple upgrade that’s required to unlock the next stage of gameplay, it’s not fun. I stopped playing Valheim for a while for that exact reason.
Crafting on its own can be a great mechanic (for me anyways) if it’s done right though. It’s one of the reasons I always go back to Minecraft modpacks every now and then. They offer so many interesting and alternate pathways to craft better gear/machines/materials etc, and it can be fun trying to find shortcuts or wacky ways to achieve your goals, especially since the game doesn’t pressure you to do anything else.
Agreed! The recent Tomb Raider games were good in that you could pretty much casually come across the materials required to improve your weapons.
But if you have to collect 15 predator hides and 50 bamboo to increase your quiver by 4 arrows...that's ridiculous
100% agreed. If i can get by without engaging in crafting or fishing that's fine. But i will bounce so hard if I need to wander around looking for 50 of some plant for my next armor upgrade.
For myself I'd also add NO BASE BUILDING. I despise having to manage and build some base as a timesink. If there's a base of operations that grows as I advance? Sure, but I DO NOT want to be placing walls and roofs to progress the game.
EDIT: caveat being games where it is the whole game. I don't mind Minecraft and I bet I could get into Subnautica.
The second a game trailer gets to the part where they show a timelapse sequence of cubic base segments being assembled, I'm immediately out of there.
I generally like base building, but I can definitely appreciate the desire not to spend hours on a base, and I tend to appreciate the devs that recognize this and make that aspect optional. Hell even Minecraft doesn't require you to build anything really. Subnautica is also flexible in this regard (to an extent) because there is a point in the game where you can go fully mobile.
I can appreciate when it is done well. I guess what turns me off when it is optional is that my mind goes to "well why did you spend resources on building this, could you have made the rest of the game waves hand everywhere better/cheaper?"
Same here. I admit I do like base building, but I want to base build for function and gameplay. Why grind out walls of there is nothing to keep out? Generally what I'm looking for is the bar building supporting the overall experience of the game, and if it doesn't integrate well it doesn't work well for me. I'm definitely not an artistic builder and everything I've made for years can be summed up as a long rectangle with chests along the wall, so I really want that rectangle to support the gameplay.
Mmm, yeah I can see that for sure. This has been a major complaint for No Man's Sky, since it has so many optional subparts (missions, crafting, farming, cooking, base building) that the whole experience feels diluted.
I’ve always thought crafting has been the greatest missed opportunity for games to provide the tiniest bit of actually useful knowledge. Instead of crafting being some half-assed minigame like “collect four iron ores and bang them with your hammer“ it could be an actual step-by-step tutorial on real life blacksmithing.
I mean, if I’m interested enough in the idea of crafting in video games, shouldn’t I be at least a bit curious about how these crafts are actually done? Instead, it’s just tapping buttons, combining gibberish.
I thought Factorio did a reasonably good job of this. I definitely understand the complexities of the oil and nuclear industries a lot better now than I did before.
As someone that's several years into a real life blacksmithing program, there's enough steps even for a very basic forming of metal from one shape to another that it wouldn't work as a step-by-step crafting portion of a game, let alone actually doing so from ore itself. There's a reason pretty much all crafting minigames were/are entire professions on their own.
Satisfactory has a bit of “realistic” crafting. Like, you pump oil and refine it into fuel and plastic.
Ooh, I can one-up your no fishing requirement:
No minigames.
I despise 'em. Every single one I've ever had the displeasure of playing is just a hard left into dumb, orthogonal mechanics that have nothing to do with the game you thought you were playing. People make fun of Morrowind's stupid dice rolls for lockpicking, but it's still better than the minigames that came after. (And the game designers even realize this: a repeated quest reward is a macguffin that obviates the lockpicking minigame.)
Fishing is definitely high on the list of obnoxious minigames, though.
Question - where do you draw the line between "minigame" and "gameplay mechanic"? Because I would argue that the lockpicking "minigames" of later Elder Scrolls games are just expansion of game mechanics.
Some games have clear cases where something is a "minigame" rather than a "gameplay mechanic" - for instance, I'm currently playing FF7 Rebirth and the card game "Queen's Blood" is a perfect example of something being a minigame. As far as I've seen, it hold no relevance to anything else within the game world, other than being a little diversion.
But would fishing be considered a minigame for, say, Animal Crossing: New Horizons? At some point a game's systems are expanded to include elements beyond the basic look of a game. Even Morrowind had "minigames" - spell crafting, for example, could be viewed as a minigame of sorts. It involves elements beyond the basic dicerolls inherent in all other aspects of the game.
Not the person you're replying to, but I'd say a minigame is any subsection of the game with its own win-lose conditions. Literally just a miniature game within the broader game. The lockpicking minigame in Bethesda games takes you to another screen where you're given a new (temporary) objective and separate mechanics to accomplish it. Hacking in System Shock and Bioshock is similar.
Personally I don't have a problem with them, especially when they're optional, but I can see how some people would find them annoying for interrupting the gameplay flow and breaking immersion.
At the same time, though - while those lockpicking minigames may have separate mechanics, they lead to specific rewards and consequences in the "main game". Lockpicking affects your ability to access areas necessary for the continuation of those games' main stories.
If we're using the definition of a minigame to be "an element of the game, separate from the broader game, with its own win/loss conditions" ... then almost every fight in every roleplaying game ever made is a minigame. The main gameplay loop in old JRPGs is largely running around from place to place, talking to people to advance the story. The running-around-and-talking loop is broken up by intermittent, random bouts of combat. The combat mechanics are only utilized in those fights, which do not occupy the majority of the time spent playing the game.
If we look back to Skyrim and its comparison earlier to Morrowind, we find two very different games. Morrowind was based mostly in pen-and-paper tradition with dicerolls and modifiers; Skyrim lacks almost all of those elements. Comparing the mechanics of Morrowind to Skyrim is like comparing the mechanics of Final Fantasy XVI (which is an action game with mild RPG elements, if we're being honest) to those of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth (which, while still having more active action-oriented combat, actually utilizes traditional RPG elements). Or, if we want to make a more apt comparison - it's like comparing Final Fantasy 13 to Final Fantasy 16, which are separated by a similar length of time as Morrowind and Skyrim.
My personal opinion is that the distinction between a "minigame" and a "gameplay mechanic" is mostly meaningless. Nowadays, it is very unusual for a minigame to exist totally separate from the surrounding game world it inhabits. They are becoming increasingly less "meaningless" and more "fun diversion with mild rewards, and occasionally changes to the story itself".
How would you integrate lock picking more organically into an action-RPG like Elder Scrolls or modern Fallout?
Lock picking in Morrowind was especially obnoxious though because it was so heavily based on RNG. I find more modern implementations like the one found in Starfield a lot more engaging.
I'm also curious what you think of the lock picking present in the early Splinter Cells. There, it is a thematically relevant, core mechanic of the game, but still presented similarly to a lot of modern lock picking "minigames".
I actually like crafting, but there has to be some way to automate either gathering of resources or crafting (or both) as you progress. Lego Fortnite does a decent job of this with villagers (still could be polished), and Minecraft has a farm for everything once you get to the later game. I don't like escalation of this mechanic until it becomes an ever expanding factory game though.
I am the exaxt opposite.
I love fishing in games. It is not a hard limit that it has to include it, but if it is it's a big plus point for the game.
If there's fishing there's a good chance that's where I'll be haha.
My friends and I used to play an mmo called archeage and it has oceans and player owned boats. Instead of spending my time and effort getting a cool giant ship-of-the-line I instead purchased the just as expensive small fishing boat to spend more time at sea. That game has a pretty great fishing mini game, one that kinda makes you feel like you're actually fishing.
Depends on how it's implemented, I think. I know some people struggle with the reaction time in fishing in Stardew Valley for example, to the point many mods exist for it. It can make completing at least one of the Community Center bundles pretty hard. Other games can have it be an incredibly flimsy mechanic, or take up a LOT of time.
Then there's Big the Cat's levels in Sonic Adventure DX...
I like crafting in games (not ALL games, mind you), but I am with you on fishing. I still have never beat Stardew valley because of the fishing requirement and I refuse to go the "evil capitalist" route.
I generally love crafting, but like others said it shouldn’t be a chore. You should have the option to easily buy most materials if you don’t have them.
It’s interesting you mention hating fishing as it’s a much loved zelda mini game.
I generally dislike inventory management as a mechanic, especially in some games where figuring out what to keep and what to avoid ends up being half the game. Just let me hoard my stuff please
I loathe inventory management in most games too, especially RPGs, and almost always just use Cheat Engine to remove the inventory limitations from them. E.g. Depending on where the limitation lies, I usually accomplish that by either increasing stack sizes to 999 (like I recently did in Horizon Zero Dawn), or by increasing my carry weight to effectively infinite (like I did for Baldur's Gate 3).
I can't be bothered wasting my time dealing with the tedium of inventory management, especially when a game already has 60-100+ hours of gameplay I want to get through. So I simply refuse to spend an additional however-many-hours over the course of the game constantly fiddling with my inventory, figuring out what to loot, what to leave behind, what items/gear to keep on hand, what to sell, etc. And like you, I greatly prefer no inventory limitations so I can just quickly loot absolutely everything and move on to the next part of the game/story.
A lot of game designers seem to conflate tedium with immersion. I assume my character, in their own time, is sorting through and organizing their backpack, just like I assume they're popping, peeing, sleeping, eating, drinking, masturbating, getting sick and recovering, calling their parents if applicable, attending birthday parties, doing their taxes, and so on.
I don't need to see every tedious moment of their lives, so I don't know why inventory management is the hill so many devs choose to die on and not, say, brushing your teeth as a mechanic.
I do all that stuff in real life not because it's fun, but because I have to. I'd prefer to keep it out of the games that I'm ostensibly playing to fill my time with things that aren't the tedious necessities of life.
I'm definitely using this.
This is basically the thing that killed Read Dead Redemption 2 for me. My god, did they love tedium. Literally everything took forever and they constantly slowed down your horse so they could fit conversations into the journey. The game might have been fun if it actually let you play it.
And then there is hunting, which was so obsessed with realism that it basically ruined any incentive to actually do it. Why did they need to put in realistic skinning animations????
Obvious this is dealbreakers, but I'm the complete opposite of this. I find without some sort of inventory management, I have too much of anything and I feel immediately overwhelmed. One of the main reasons I never went back to Divinity: Original Sin 2, was that the inventory was just an enormous clusterfuck. I'd load up the game again after some time away, look at my inventory and see it's just hundreds of random little items and just shut it down.
At least inventory management encourages me to get rid of stuff and keep everything a manageable size and leads me to make some decisions.
Im finally starting breath of the wild and even in that game im starting to feel that same freling. There's so much random crap in the inventory that might be used in some sort of elixir or food or whatever and it just feels convoluted
On the other hand, if i take a game like Terraria I can and will throw out stuff i don't need, and other stuff I'll organize neatly into different chests. You have a limited inventory size and are forced to organise, store, and discard items.
With BOTW all you get for organization is pre determined tabs and a sort button which I find a little overwhelming.
Yes, this is a huge annoyance. I have all these items and random things I can cook, but it's tedious as fuck to try and go through and figure out each recipe. Not only does the interface for it suck (why can't I just stand next to a fire, select some things and say "Cook" from the inventory and get a thing, rather than go through this convoluted menu where I have to "hold" things, this watch/press an extra button to skip this unnecessary animation and music, ugh), but I have no idea what things do, even after I cook something successful.
I like BotW, but I generally just try to avoid interacting with the cooking system altogether. When I need food, I will spend just like 20 minutes throwing stuff together and getting random things, trying to use up most of what I have so I don't have to interact with it again for awhile.
Tears of the Kingdom is a little better in this respect; once you have cooked something for the first time it becomes a recipe you can select and it will automatically put all the ingredients together and cook them.
I hated games like Borderlands where every enemy drops all kinds of guns and such. Early on it's a way to occasionally get a better weapon, but after a short period of time it becomes a matter of swapping out less valued guns for more valuable ones to sell...and they're all shit tier quality too so it's counting pennies.
A friend has introduced me to Terraria and we have a lot of fun with it, and the inventory management is the only thing I dislike about it. I can't imagine I would ever get into this game if I didn't have someone to guide me through it because the amount of items, crafting opportunities, and lack of inventory space is truly overwhelming
I must be able to rebind buttons, and in particular, rebind the button 'c' to map.
It's just what I use. C for cartography was my initial choice because I thought that was funny, but mostly I just wanted an easily accessible button for map, and it stuck. It's very convenient.
Horizon: Zero Dawn did have button rebinding - but it straight up said "naah, not for C dawg." I literally un-installed over that.
Same, except I rebind crouch to S instead so the movement keys become WAXD. It's the same control scheme System Shock 2 had, and I found myself liking it.
This is why I love PC gaming! I used to have some very unconventional preferred binds as well (ASDX for movement keys, though I've since come around on WASD).
You have me moving my middle finger between W and X while trying not to remove my ring and index fingers from A and D. I feel like I'm playing Twister with my hand. I imagine it's a little easier on a keyboard with an orthogonal layout. I find X much easier to hit with my index finger, but losing access to a strafe key while backpedaling is a problem for me.
I actually used to use aszx (where s and z were forward and backward, respectively) for a long time because it felt more like a natural d-pad arrangement when I rotated my left wrist slightly. I also eventually came around to wasd because of it being more universal. The aszx config feels alien to me now.
Interesting! Which finger do you use for X; middle or index?
Index, moving between D and X.
In the future you may circumvent that using AutoHotkey. You don't even need to code it, just ask GPT to write the script for you, and make sure to request it to only trigger the changes inside the game. Just be careful not to use it for online competitive games as it may be flagged as cheating.
Oh I know, I thought about it. I also have Razer keyboard and mouse, could've just done a quick remap and been done with it.
It's probably irrational, but it's the principle of the damn thing to me. Absolutely no reason that should be the case besides laziness, nowadays. Someone hardcoded C to something in the PC port, and they said fuck it good enough. Infuriating.
I just remembered that you don't even need AutoHotkey for that. You can rebind keys for specific programs using the officially endorsed Microsoft PowerToys.
cries in Figma
Hadn't heard of Figma before.
Looking at their website for roughly 3 seconds made me want to die. I cannot imagine ever developing in that kind of environment. People moving shit around when I'm trying to think would be insane.
hahaha yeah as a dev who also does design, there are a lot of times when I'm like "ffs this is so much easier in code" but after spending some dedicated time learning & practicing it, I've found it really nice. Usually it's just me making mockups and then sharing them to other people though. By far my biggest complaint is being unable to change the hotkeys, several of their binds overlap with global keybinds I have for other things and there's nothing I can do about it
because I have been too lazy to set up ahk overrides thus farAh, I do lots of statistical / analytical programming, but I don't really do design so I can't speak to that, I guess it could be nice in that scenario. It does read to me like a tool that (micro-)managers would love (I'm helping!), and actual developers would abhor, but that's probably just my personal preferences bleeding through.
Many, many years ago when I first started playing FPS games, I had very small hands. Take into consideration that I am VERY old, and the FPS meta is asdw for movement. So in the late 80s or early 90s when the first FPS games started using asdw, my middle finger couldn't really reach the W key on the MASSIVE old mechanical keyboards. In order to fix this, I compensated by moving the "backwards" key from 's' to 'x' and made the forward key 's'.
Now it's 2024 and asdx is hardwired into my brain and I cannot operate in any other way. If I cannot rebind buttons in an FPS and I have to use asdw, I just straight up cannot play the game. It's totally weird, I know. I could probably try to retrain myself, but you know... old dog/new tricks.
I did the exact same thing for nearly 20 years, for almost the exact same reason. WASD didn't become the de-facto standard until around the turn of the millennium. ESDF and eventually WASD were popular control schemes among pro Quake players for a while, but Quake 2 still shipped using arrow keys by default. Half-Life finally set the standard in 1998 shipping with WASD by default. 12 year old me knew none of this though, didn't own Half-Life, and invented ASDX independently to make switching weapons in Quake easier.
About 5 years ago I finally put in the effort to acclimate myself to WASD. It took surprisingly little time, 2-3 days playing shooters a couple hours each evening, and the effort has been worth it. On modern keyboards, with my adult-sized hands, WASD is more ergonomic. I also find that X is a more valuable key for non-movement bindings than W, since I can hit it with my index finger without losing access to forward or back.
Not a requirement per se, but lately I have been seeking out more games where I have as much control as possible over the game files and their ownership. It's hard to explain, but take games like Minecraft for example. If I create a Minecraft world, it's all mine. If Mojang screwed up future versions of the game, or just ceased to exist tomorrow, I would still (mostly) be able to play my Minecraft world. Contrast this to something like Lego Fortnite where I literally can't play without an internet connection. It becomes hard for me to justify the hours when the fruits of my labor could evaporate in an instant due to the state of some company or other external factors.
As I said... not a requirement. I still play Lego Fortnite. I'm just a little more honest with myself about the level of effort I will sink into it.
I was just thinking about how much it bums me out when an RPG doesn’t change your character’s appearance with the armor you have equipped.
It’s the combination of a visual hook to confirm that your character’s stats are different than they were, and the additional vector of decision making and customization that really does it for me.
I toootally get that it’s a sizable resource lift to produce that many assets, but the feeling of progression from seeing your character change can be just the push I need to stick with a game that I might not otherwise be totally motivated to see through (i.e. most RPGs, unfortunately)
I’ve fallen off some GREAT games (Final Fantasy, Persona, Like a Dragon, etc) and I wonder if I might have been more likely to continue with just this one tweak.
What's even more annoying to me is how Persona does change your party's appearance with different armor but only with certain armor pieces (usually with lower stats).
If anything, I think I prefer how the Tales Of series and Lies of P do it by having cosmetics being separate from armor. That way you can change your appearance however you like without having to worry about taking a hit to your stats.
Layered armor should be in more games. My desire for style shouldn't wreck my stats
I only started modding Baldur's Gate 3 because I got so tired of having to wear ugly armor. Having my character look cool is half the fun of gear!
I like survival games but dislike the survival aspect of the games such as thirst and hunger if that makes any sense. Also way too many games have hunger/thirst that just goes down way too fast, this turns the game into an extremely tedious experience for me where instead of exploring the wonder of the land you are always gobbling down food ever 5 min.
It was the standard for a long time until Valheim reversed the paradigm from being punished for not eating to be rewarded when taking the time to cook and eat. It's much better when it's the latter.
My partner and I got completely turned off with the "keep cool" (or maybe it was warm!) and "keep eating" aspects of "Don't Starve Together" (DST). I think we struggled on, not having a great time, until somehow a fire got started at our base, at which point we both swore off the stupid game and never went back. I vaguely remember immense annoyance at not being able to save (at will? YES, I'm a filthy save scummer for my own enjoyment, sue me), although I wouldn't swear to it.
For comparison, we ended up sinking about 500 hours (and counting) into Stardew Valley, so it turned out that DST was entirely not aimed at us.
The last game I played was Medeival Dynasty. Tried to play it "correctly" and failed miserably, then I turned off hunger/thirst etc and had a much better experience personally. Same thing with Kingdom Come Deliverance as well.
Guess I'm not hard-core enough for these games.
I am in complete agreement with this. I like how Valheim does it where you don't "need" to eat, but it gave you boosts in health, stamina, and later their mana equivalent.
I have a thing against pixel art. It just looks so... intentionally bad. Even "really good" pixel art looks like trash to me, and is only good in the sense of "wow that's a very impressive photograph for a potato camera". I can get into games that use it, but it's always in spite of the art style.
I also play a lot of games without sound, so requiring sound for gameplay is usually a hard limit for me.
Also fuck minigames, and especially fishing minigames.
See, I'm the exact opposite way! I'm very unlikely to play a photo realistic game; the more photo realistic, the less interested I am.
Sprite art is my ideal, because my imagination is far more powerful than anything modern technology can conjure up.
Photorealism as a whole isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but the strains of it where it’s being used as an excuse to skip out on art direction completely are a big turnoff. It comes off as lazy and makes for a game with practically no visual identity.
It’s kind of like the difference between raw live action footage and what ends up on TV and theater screens: the former is technically more “realistic” but it’s also a lot more unremarkable and devoid of expression.
There's also the consideration that games that attempt realism in graphics have a tendency to age very poorly, while games that go for a heavily stylized aesthetic are more likely to remain evergreen.
By way of example, Super Mario World and the original Mortal Kombat were released within a year of each other. Super Mario World wouldn't look terribly out of place listed as a new indie on itch.io today, but I think most would agree that from a purely aesthetic standpoint, MK looks like hot garbage to us today. Whatever appeal it has is probably more nostalgia or kitsch than genuine aesthetic appreciation.
Hello, fellow pixel-art appreciator! Have I got a treat for you!
Oh man, we are so different. I wanted to write a seven paragraph dissertation about why your tastes were objectively wrong. :P
I just plain can’t get into a game without a good soundtrack, so playing a game on mute is like torture to me. And pixel art is usually a mark of quality that means that a person has spent a lot of time futzing about with the details because it’s really clear when they don’t. Lazy or unimagnative art is one of my big turn-offs, and I tend to feel it more strongly with the stuff that isn’t pixel art. There’s a lot to unpack with this subject but I’ll leave it here for the moment.
I can appreciate a lot of the things people have brought up on this post. But this one is the first full-on dealbreaker I have encountered. I'm with you — I hate that art style. I've never been interested in any game that uses it.
Coincidentally, I don't really play indie games.
Are you sure?.
Quite sure. It's impressive that people can do this, and I can appreciate the skill involved on those grounds, but the result would be better in nearly any other art style.
What about something like Hyperlight Drifter or The Last Night? Or Signalis?
The first and third look ugly to me - like the other example someone replied with, I can appreciate the skill, but the result is still bad.
The second won't let me watch it without signing into youtube, but you can probably predict my reaction anyway :)
Passably smart AI, particularly in FPS RPGs. Cyberpunk and Starfield are two that come immediately to mind.
Nothing takes me out of the experience like the enemies that lose interest in you halfway through a battle, shoot at walls, don’t respond to being flanked etc. Obviously there’s a balance been intelligent acting enemies and difficulty, but I find a lot of games aren’t interested in creating more than a series of shooting galleries of gormless chumps to be mowed down.
Bad AI is an instant refund for me.
I don’t particularly like FPS games, but I still have no idea why more games aren’t just copies of F.E.A.R. Shooting game AI feels like it was solved with that game.
I have to try that, I’ve read before it’s the gold standard for enemy AI.
I’m not hugely into straight FPS myself, but mix it with a bit of strategy and role playing, and I’ll usually find something to enjoy.
I don't do grind.
I got to the very last dungeon in Persona 5 Royal, loved the game up until then, and immediately lost interest when I realized I was probably a few levels behind... Same thing with 4, spent probably 70 hours in the game, I got to the blood jesus boss about 10 levels under and there's no chance in hell I'm going to fight it up there. Played through Final Fantasy 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 14, and I haven't finished any of them. Love the aesthetic, love the stories, adore the music, got to Zeromus and Exdeath, was underleveled, immediately stopped playing lol. No interest in going back.
I mostly agree. Grinding is unnecessary padding to make the game longer, and there is no reason for it other than not respecting the player’s time. It could be in some cases that they are letting grinding replace the player learning an aspect of the battle system, (i.e. you are supposed to use magic to defeat a boss but you are so strong you can just punch it to death), but almost universally the endgame is made to make it impossible to take this strategy since you will need to grind for days to do so and in many cases it still won’t work.
Grinding can turn what would be a masterpiece to me into an uninstall. I am deeply, deeply interested in Remnant: From the Ashes, all of the gameplay in between boss fights is great, but I haven't beaten a single boss on my own yet. If I'm on the easiest difficulty, I should be able to move forward without having to backtrack and grind.
Yes I fully agree with this! If a game has difficulty settings, it absolutely should always have a “story” mode where you’re just here to experience the game, not grind hours away for a slight stat boost or spend hours practicing moves and combos in order to get past a certain section.
With extremely few exceptions, I will not play first-person games. I don't care how highly it reviews or how many people recommend it to me.
I don't think this is terribly irrational, though. The vast majority of first-person games make me feel violently ill. Being able to see my character (even if everything else looks the same) grounds the view in a way that absolutely nothing else works. Disabling camera bob, adjusting the field of view, etc. — none of these seem to do me much, if any, good.
There are a handful of first-person games that don't make me instantly sick, but they are very rare (I'd estimate less than 5% of the first-person titles out there). I have played and enjoyed a few of them, but I am no longer open to trying any new ones. The cost of checking whether a given game will suit me is simply too high; just 30 seconds of play can ruin the rest of my day.
I already have a huge backlog of third-person games I want to play, and I have other hobbies as well, so I'm simply done with first-person forever (other than the small handful in my library that I've already vetted).
I have the opposite problem! While I do enjoy a handful of third person games, most of the time the camera is either too close, has a weird zooming in angle, or the characters take up too much of the screen. Any of those can make me ill.
First-person games also make me nauseous! So far the only one that doesn't is Subnautica, which I love. I don't know if maybe it's because of the underwater setting so the camera movement is "smooth".
Oh lord I hate the motion sickness that most first person games give me. I made it about 15 minutes into Bioshock before I had to through in the towel (or else I was going to throw something else). The only way I can play them is handheld on the switch. Similar to feanne though, Subnautica didn't give me any problems. I wonder what makes that one different
Same. Makes me actually sad that I am completely unable to play Witness, Portal 1&2, Slime Rancher etc. I have even tried taking anti nausea meds and limiting to 15 minutes sessions to no avail. Violently ill needing bed rest for the rest of the evening bad.
It took me weeks of playing Portal as a high-schooler to figure out that it was motionsickness. At first it was like, "sometimes I am feeling sick recently and I don't know why," eventually it became, "when I play Portal for a long time I am feeling sick and I don't know why," soon after "when I play Portal at all I am feeling sick and I MUST FIGURE THIS OUT" and then I went through a list of things that I do during the game and I was like, well, it can't be a smell or touch or taste obviously, I don't think it's the sound, so it's something I see. There's nothing gross about it....and finally I realized it must be the motion. Once I was aware of that, that was it, no more first-person games ever again.
Out of curiosity, do you get motion sickness from watching videos of people playing first-person games?
yes, it's tragic to me because I'm a huge esports fan and I can't watch CSGO, COD, Halo, etc. Speedrunning first-person games is also a no-go. Recently I tried to watch that "blindfolded Mario" video that was posted here, and I made it maybe 5 minutes before I had to bail.
If I'm sitting like 10' away from the screen, it's a bit more okay, and I used to hang out with friends playing videogames in college a bit as long as I was sitting super far back. But by necessity it means I can't really see the screen well enough to play myself.
Perhaps it's not that irrational but any game that crashes more than once in a single session is a pretty fast uninstall for me. It seems to be a lot more common these days in popular titles and some friends seem to just shrug it off as no big deal but I find it infuriating.
If It's a new game made for modern day computers, yeah It annoys me a lot too. I do however give games quite a bit of leeway if they're made for old Pentiums. SimCity 4 is a prime example of this. It's 32-bit, single threaded, and was released over 20 years ago. It just hates modern computers, even with mods. I still love it and play it regularly though.
I’ve heard from others who played the game at the time that Sim City 4 was a miracle that it ran at all on computers of the time. Not necessarily because of the bugs (but also not entirely not because of them), but because of how computationally complex the game was.
I was playing it on a cheap Dell Dimension around 2005; I remember it running fairly well. I was a kid and not so great at the game then, so my cities probably never made it past 150k people. I wouldn't be surprised if I was able to make it to at least 400k people back then the computer would have struggled. You're right though, it does have a lot going under the hood, I'm honestly still shocked that a game so complex could run on such a terrible computer.
As for the bugs, yeah they certainly existed, (Prop pox, region corruption, broken traffic pathfinding to name a few) but I don't recall any crashes that weren't caused by me overworking that poor computer.
Going even further back I played a lot of SimCity2000 and that game was rock solid. However Maxis also released a multiplayer version called Network Edition and that thing couldn't last 10mins without crashing.
Surprised to not see.. drumroll
Roguelite/Roguelike
The playing and dying loop just to get a little farther each time. I really dislike the appeal of not having a character progress. I want to cling to what I have achieved.
And as a bit of sidenote, I prefer a one-character game instead of having to deal with multiple characters. Even worse is randomly generated teams that come and (sadly) go, or the management of teams.
Maybe it's a preference and not really an irrational requirement.. so yea
What about something like Hades which is still fundamentally a Rougelite but has elements a progression vis-a-vis evolving NPC relationships, side quests, weapon unlocks, and permanent skill upgrades?
One of the things that impressed me the most about Hades was the sheer depth of small changes that happen as you continuously make your runs though the underworld. I have no idea how many runs I attempted, but it feels like there was new dialog every time I got to the Furies (first boss). You run though and fight Megera who has a pool of unique dialog for multiple fights, then the outcome of the fight affects her dialog in the hub area, then at some point her sisters show up and you fight each of them with unique dialog across multiple battles, which also affects dialog with Meg in the hub world, then as you romance Meg it affects the dialog with each of the sisters you fight, then when you finally reach the surface that'll change the dialog, then if you keep playing and enable the Heat option for harder bosses then you have to fight all three of them together which has unique dialog pools.
At a certain point I thought, "Am I playing a Rougelite with NPC relationships tacked on or am I playing a visual novel with a Rougelite tacked on?"
I'm ok with Rougelikes that require multiple playthroughs to see all the possible items/bonuses offered.
However if the game requires multiple plays to unlock content that without you wont have a remote chance of finishing (without having godlike skills/knowledge) then I'd rather play something else.
I'm a huge fan of Roguelikes myself, so I can't say I agree with you. I do see why it doesn't appeal to you though. I sometimes get frustrated when losing a game I put a lot of effort into. One of my favourites is NetHack and most people who play it can tell you how brutally difficult it is, so having a good run getting absolutely demolished by something out of your control can be frustrating and not all that uncommon.
Your reply did remind me of another gripe of mine. I dislike how loosely the term Roguelike is used to describe games. I feel like it's lost all meaning at this point and any game that has perma-death is classified as one. Finding what I'd consider to be a Roguelike by looking through the Roguelike tag on Steam is way too difficult.
I don't play them that often, but I think one of the best things about true roguelike games is that you can pick them up at any point in time and you're going to have a reasonably good time without a lot of the things that make games feel repetitive.
Roguelites are a bit different, though. Having some things persist can completely upend my perception about repetition. There are some exceptions, but that's generally how it goes for me.
It's come to the point where if I see a game where the word "random" comes up anywhere in the description, I instantly dismiss it. Randomly generated levels almost always fall somewhere between mediocre and terrible; level design is actually important. If it means I miss out on roguelikes, that's fine; I honestly don't think that any true roguelike has really improved massively over nethack as far as gameplay goes, and I don't think changing the aesthetic aspects really makes much difference.
I couldn't agree with you more. In a selfish way it pains me to see such good gaming talent be 'wasted' on a genre I thoroughly dislike, but then I have to remind myself, 'you know, different strokes.' I will say that the one game that's gotten me to break my staunch aversion to the genre is Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. Honestly, it's pretty much because I absolutely love its parent game and the OST. I understand it's heavily based on Vampire Survivors, which I have zero interest in.
Actually, a major reason why I had my opinion soured on VS is even more irrational: I found out there aren't actually any vampires in VS despite the name.
Idk if it's irrational but I absolutely refuse to play anything that doesn't run at an average 60 fps (at least when it comes to anything in the last decade). Anything below that feels so noticeably choppy and unpleasant to play. I don't know how some people handle it but I cannot, and believe me I really tried when I first got my ps5 and wanted to see how far the graphics could be pushed.
Outside of technical specs though, I am generally very pedantic about games having difficulty settings (or some other mechanic that's geared towards making the game easier/harder to beat) . I want to be able to choose if I want to play a game casually and relax, or if I want to try hard and get irritated. My time is limited so if a game forces me to play at only its pace, I usually will put it down (of course this applies more towards hard games rather than easy games, for obvious reasons). To me, if a game doesn't have any form of difficulty adjustment, it's a failure in the game design department.
Sub-60-frames can go to hell, agreed.
Nothing irrational about how you chose to recreate. However to fill in the vast tapestry of human of human experience I routinely drop games to 30 or 20hz, as I prefer the steam deck to be quiet and cool to the game running more smoothly.
Being unable to do so would definitely turn me off of a game.
I also have a Deck and run it regularly at 30-40FPS. I honestly don't care much about the framerate as long as it suits the game and is playable. Last year I bought a 165Hz monitor and was told it was going to "change my life." and yeah it's neat, but....that's about it.
Cyberpunk looks cool at 100FPS, but I'm just as happy to play it at all on my Deck at 30FPS. Being able to play the game where and how I want to play it is far more important to me and while I can see the difference between 30-60FPS, after a few minutes, the difference bleeds away and there's just the gameplay left.
I hear that. Dark souls 3 is one of my favorite games, but I'm too old now to enjoy going further, and not good enough to check out the newer games. Hell I'd even be happy with an empty world as it's the theme and setting I love so much
I refuse to play any game that has a development team too large for me to contact the lead developer in an informal way.
Usually this means I play solo project indie games, or very small studios.
It is very nice to be able to join a forum or (more typically) discord server and be able to post questions to the developers about short and long term plans, or discuss bugs, or have some informal debate about whether something is emergent gameplay or an unintended problem.
When a game from a large studio crashes, I can send the logs and they will be put into some system and prioritized just below the next microtransaction feature. There will be no follow up. There might be a patch note about it 18 months later.
When I post crash logs to an indie development team, I often get very personal responses. There is back and forth about what my system looks like, what I was doing, some suggestions to narrow down the crash, and sometimes even a patch pushed out the same day.
If it's a competitive game it needs to have a mostly casual community. I can't stand ranked game modes, they always bring out the worst in people.
And getting penalized for leaving mid match is the worst, your game is not my life. I have other s**t to do!
That's not why they're penalizing you for leaving early. They're penalizing you because you're not respecting the player on the other side. Consider their time is valuable to them too. I understand where you're coming from, I really do, but it's irrelevant to the health of the multiplayer aspect of the game. You can't not penalize people for leaving or it would constantly happen for trivial reasons too.
I get it, but I still don't like it! It's perfectly reasonable for a game developer to include a early-leaver penalty, and if I were the kind of person to enjoy ranked modes I would be grateful for it, but we're talking about irrational requirements here.
I'd much rather hop onto Titanfall 2, get some frags and leave if I get bored than be forced to stay in an OW game for it's entire duration even if I lost interest half-way through.
Understandable, hopping in and out in games without penalty is sparse because most games are competitive.
That’s still a game design issue, not a technological problem. There are plenty of team based games I’ve played where if a player quits partway through, their spot is just backfilled by a random person who was queued up to play that game mode.
In ranked modes, that’s disabled, which makes sense because you want matchmaking to pair you up against similar skill ratings, but everything outside of ranked should be drop-in drop-out if the game respects your time and attention.
I'll totally write off games because of their name. I'll form a totally irrational opinion based on the name of the game, even if it's totally wrong, and run with it.
For example, I played an honestly terrible game called Divinity Dragon Knight and wrote off everything called Divinity. When all my friends (and the Internet) raved about Divinity 1 and 2 I refused to play either, and still haven't, because of that bad blood with a totally different game from a totally different company.
I've also just avoided real gems because of their names, making assumptions for what they are or their quality. I have no idea why I have this strong prejudice.
I had this exact same experience with the Witcher series. A "witcher" has always just seemed like a dumb name for a character class. There are witches, warlocks, mages, wizards, necromancers, and so on--why does there need to be a new one called a "witcher"? I've gotten over it, but I maintained that aversion to the series for many years just because of that silly opinion.
In response to OPs description in the post:
Bunny hopping for me in FPS was something annoying from the Call of Duty UO days on PC. People did it to get away from people shooting you. Also the games at the time would allow you to shoot and bunny hop but not lose any accuracy while shooting. So it was a bug that people loved to exploit.
On the other hand, in Titanfall 2, bunnyhopping has been generally accepted because it's a movement shooter at its core, it's a relatively easy manoeuvre to pull off, and it effectively raised the game's skill ceiling. Not saying it's not infuriating to encounter, but finally getting the hang of it myself was genuinely thrilling.
That's interesting to me. I've never played the old Call of Duty games, so I had no idea that it was considered a bad thing in those games. It's honestly surprising seeing a community for a game built on the id Tech 3/Quake III: Arena engine dislike bunny hopping. Was it seen as something that broke the realism, or was it more about it being unfair?
Probably both. But the older CoDs strived for realism, so watching a player jumping and bouncing around like in Quake wouldn't fly. I doubt most players knew which game engine it was built on anyway.
It was still possible to do and exploit, but frowned upon. There were even private servers that people would add rules for that said "Bunny Hopping will get you banned" and they were very serious about it.
I don't really have a specific irrational requirement, instead I've got this seemingly weird dislike of games that seem too similar to previous games I enjoyed.
E.g. if you're making a sequel to a game I enjoyed, it'd better have some significant gameplay improvements over the previous one, or I put it down after a few minutes.
This has gotten so bad in my mind that my selection of acceptable games is tiny - mostly sims with heavily complex mechanics, because most popular games these days feel like the same thing rehashed over and over (even though I know that's objectively not true in many cases) and I can't bring myself to enjoy them.
This is another one I agree with. Sadly I could not enjoy Tears of the Kingdom because I had already played Breath of the Wild and it just added another feature (building stuff) I don't like on top.
I get that. When I was growing up games were still really experimental in their gameplay; there may have been 100 different platformers to try out but they generally had unique somethings that would make them stand out - if not their gameplay, then their graphics, music, or concept. I feel that a lot of modern games are chasing some degree of homogeneity. For an example, people love the Uncharted and The Last of Us games, but to me they are good movies cut into pieces by what is essentially the same gameplay for all of them. They even look too much like each other.
For any game to go above a 7/10 in my eyes, it needs to have interesting UI and UX, especially when navigating menus. Prime examples are Persona, Frostpunk, Dead Space and Astroneer. At first I thought that it needed to be diagetic and part of the fiction, but I hate Fallouts pipboy and the GTA/RDR style of cell phones and catalogs.
I realized it needs to further the themes and draw me into the world or even just become a game of its own. Thinking of recent examples, Pacific Drive has its own style of pipboy with an ARV display but you interact with the world through lot of devices with their own unique displays and menu systems. I'm also playing a ton of inventory tetris in levels but once I get to base, it's fine to dump loot into lockers and the game will auto sort and use items in crafting. By contrast, Bethesda UI and systems are an antiquated mess where even modded versions require a ton of scrolling and sorting and remembering where everything is.
The other modern sin is the store and cash shop advertising. You can start up fortnight, Diablo, CoD, Destiny or any sport/live service game and we all know the drill. Your old season pass is expired, check out the new season, check out the special limited time armor, pointless cinematic, buy the mini season pass, limited time event, netflix/hulu menu where the there's 6 links to the store and an invisible new game button. Combine that with cosmetics that are completely removed from the fiction and the subtle dark patterns/social manipulations; it makes games feel scummy.
The foils to that would be BattleBit or Helldivers 2 where I'm always seconds away from actual gameplay.
Yeah, I took a break from Apex Legends for about two years, and didn’t realise just how much worse it’s gotten in that time — they always had a pop-up for the latest cosmetics or events, but my memory was that it only popped up when you first opened the game, and then once you got into games etc it let you go for the session.
Now, I’m getting pop-ups immediately after a game finishes, and given I’m playing shorter game modes, that can mean seeing it pop up a dozen times in a single evening of playing games — I even had one last week where I pressed the button to close the pop-up, and another one immediately replaced it!
Games that nearly beg for money is a dealbreaker for me too. At least 75% of the reason why I like video games is the art, and if you are going to make it a transparent cash grab it’s an obvious sign that the people in charge only care about the art as a means to an end. It’s also a sign that there are 1000 other little things I don’t like littered throughout the game.
Games with a forced stealth section when the rest of the game doesn't support or allow stealth at all. I don't mind a forced stealth section when the game at least allows you to play stealth outside of that - Ghost Recon wildlands, Metro Exodus - games where you can legit play stealthy or can run and gun just fine. But when you are forced to play against the games mechanics to be stealthy drives me insane. The stealth level in the first Hotline Miami game is a great (or terrible) example. That is a game that was built around fast, efficient and brutal combat. But for 1 level lets just throw all that in the trash and make you basically guess your way though the level where none of your tools or skills from the rest of the game apply. And then after it, never use anything you might have gleaned from that section ever again.
It's only marginally related, but I hate when games change the rules on you. There's a whole language and set of rules that you learn in Stardew Valley (e.g.: some items can be interacted with, others can't; some bodies of water offer fish, other's don't; some gaps are too narrow to fit your player character; etc.). But then an expansion arrived (for free, I can't complain, the game is probably the single best game I ever played in terms of value for money) that gave a challenge (find items hidden around a new location) and required me to break so many of these rules! Suddenly, I had to fish in puddles that were impossible to fish in in the game's main location, I had to attempt to walk down gaps that would previously have been impassable, hell, I had to interact with scenery that until that expansion had been entirely scenic, not interactive. I found it incredibly irritating and ended up just following a walk-through page so that I wasn't cut off the game areas that are unlocked incrementally as you complete the challenge.
The rest of the game is very well designed and balanced, but I didn't like feeling "tricked" by the game, as it were.
If I'm looking for a new phone game, I skip over anything with good graphics. If you can afford a real art team, I assume you're going to be trying get money out of me constantly.
If the art is terrible it probably has some decent game play.
lol this reminds me of looking for new foreign restaurants to try in a big city, i.e. sketchy-looking places with terrible decor straight from the 80s probably have incredible food while the brand new super modern and sleek restaurants with great ambiance and lighting tend to have more bland food at twice the price.
Minimal cutscenes. I just can't take it anymore. So much not playing the game in a game. You can tell a good story through normal dialogue and environmental clues, I dont want to watch a little movie that stops me from doing the thing I was doing.
It’s all about how they are put in that annoys me. If it’s built around a narrative it’s perfectly fine; seeing them is one of the reasons why I am playing the game, and can be rewarding. But there are certainly ones where it is unnecessary and unwelcome. I actually found the last Final Fantasy game to be annoying with how frequent they were and how much it wants you to stop and listen to people instead of taking action.
It’s particularly annoying in action games where you push a switch and the game slowly animates the effect it has. I get needing to know what is happening, but I don’t get why it has to be so slow.
A video game may cost money to buy OR contain in-game purchases. If it has both, I'm out. I also have extremely low tolerance for in-game purchases in general.
A lot of games with microtransactions have moved to cosmetic only, which I'm completely fine with. Most of these are multiplayer-only though, which i generally avoid.
Though I don't want to make light of how loot boxes are effectively gambling and can get young people hooked on throwing money away. And then you have games with their own currency like Roblox which is another can of worms.
Anything "Cinematic", I have absolutely no patience for. If you're making a "Cinematic" game, just make a fucking movie or TV show instead, Naughty Dog.
I want to play a Game, not be told I can't go here, can't do this, can't jump on this box, I must pay attention to this character as they speak, can't think of another solution to a problem, I have to do everything in one particular way, according to the developers specifications.
I played Last of Us when it first came out, a friend loaned me his PS3 and after a couple of hours, quit it in frustration and have never even looked twice at another Naughty Dog game or game styled after them. Games to me are about offering me freedom and interesting choices, if I want to be railroaded, I'll watch a movie, which is going to have a better story, better characters and not make me feel frustrated because it's all about storytelling and doesn't carry the expectation of "Game".
I absolutely despise random spawning/respawning baddies (and powerups, ammo, first aid, etc) or any other type of "dynamic" "living" environment. I should be able to kill every single baddie and collect every single item in a level and leave it completely empty (and ideally get a score for it at the end! e.g. Doom). I should be able to finish having stomped every koopa, killed every soldier, popped every bubble, smashed every crate, and collected every coin, ring, ammo pack, armour shard, star or medikit. I should be able to memorise and optimise my path through the level to reach a definitive "100%" in the cleanest way possible. I can't play RPGs because of this; it drives me crazy as I am driven to kill every baddie I come across, and then 5 minutes later when I cross the same area they are back, and I need to kill them again and again.
A lesser crime, but still really annoying, is when resources are fixed in number, but so abundant that you can't collect all of them. E.g. falling down a long coin-filled hole in Mario where you can only collect the coins that you touch on the way down, and must by design leave 90% of the loot behind. Or when there are any sort of limited randomness to collectibles e.g. playing the slot machine in Casino Night Zone on Sonic to win extra rings.
The ultimate crime is to have respawning baddies, with a fixed amount of ammo.
Have you tried Rain World? I would be curious to what you thought of it.
I have not; I'll give it a look, thanks.
Weirdly, I just can't play games on a pc/laptop anymore. I'm on my computer all day long for work. I really prefer to keep my gaming and other stuff separate from work. I played a lot on my switch, so I ended up getting myself a steam deck
as a graduation gift and been loving it ever since. I just need to place away from my desk and really need something portable to get my mind off of things.
I don't really care for the idea of videogames as high art. Subtlety, sophistication, and melancholy are not my jam. Sidenote: why are art games so often melancholic? That's what movies and books are for. I like games that are okay with the fact that they're games. They don't try to emulate "higher" arts.
I don't care much for game designers acting out their frustrations for not being in the film industry (sorry Kojima!).
Without going into the broader discussing about whether or not video games can be considered art in the first place (assuming they are), I'd say there's plenty of "artistic" games that aren't downers. Journey is one of the most quintessentially artistic games and is fairly upbeat throughout. Outer Wilds is a bit bittersweet, but I'd say it's more hopeful and inspiring overall. The Stanley Parable is silly and dadaist. Whatever else you might want to say about The Witness, it certainly doesn't rely on heavy drama to be considered art.
I would describe Outer Wilds, and most specifically Journey as intensely melancholic although permeated by sweet moments. The Stanley Parable does not feel melancholic. "Dadaist" may be an extreme way to describe it, I'd just call it an absurdist meta narrative.
What do you mean by “high art”? Could you give an example?
For a long time videogame creators, fans, and critics have been trying to show that videogame can have the same depth and sophistication of well established narrative arts that are considered to be of a higher status. Chiefly, movies and literature.
I guess I am more curious about what exactly you find so unappealing about them. Art is too broad of a thing to dislike. It feels kind of like you are saying that you don’t like games you dislike.
I don't have a strong opinion on the things some consider to be "high art" nor do I believe they are in any way superior. However, I do believe a lot of people care about that sort of hierarchy and that may lead to a cultural environment where game makers feel compelled to make videogames that are movie-like due to their belief that, by doing so, they elevate gaming.
What I'm saying is that I generally dislike games which are the result of that impulse to "elevate" games by trying to make it either film-like, book-like, or "artsy".
These games are simply not to my liking, as they are generally subtle and delicate, with no obvious clues, making them essentially unplayable given my ADHD. I also dislike that such art games are generally quite melancholic, since being a melancholic individual myself I don't really need more stimuli in that area. I'm saturated of melancholy already.
Great gameplay is not usually a focus on art games, and, if you're not there for the narrative, they can be quite boring. Finally, I just don't think game narrative is generally very good, even on the art games people mention as exceptions, and I don't think emulating film, literature, or serious" art as a whole is the solution for that.
They're just not great games for me.
EDIT: @BeardyHat made very good points on that issue.
Forcing completion of the game's "Story Mode" to unlock content in Multiplayer/Free play modes. I paid for the full game and I want to enjoy it the way I want to, not be gatekept by your arbitrary need to have me sit through your narrative. I'm fully aware that this has been a staple of gaming for a long time - look at how many unlocks were in Goldeneye back in the day... but I've gotten older and busier and don't have time for this anymore.
Examples: FFXIV requires you to sink hundreds of hours into the story to unlock dungeons if you wanna play with your friends. Another coming to mind is the rhythm game Amplitude where you not only have to complete the campaign but also full combo every chapter's songs to unlock another song from each chapter (Something I still have yet to do as I struggle in the last chapter and refuse to lower the difficulty)
Wait, you didn't love the 100 hours visual novel before the game really starts? :P
Not Blizzard and not EA.
That rule has been in place for me for 20 years now and I feel I'm in a better spot for it.
Rewind a cut scene.
I don't think any game does this and it's become less annoying now that I can look it up on YouTube or recording but still: Lemme rewind a cut scene in case I missed something or want to watch an epic moment again
With action games the rhythm of what you do matters a lot to me. Maybe the best way to say it, is there needs to be a rhythm to it or I'll lose interest. It lets me turn my brain off a bit - keep to the rhythm and you're good - which is especially nice with a big, complex action RPG or something similar.
Edit: I thought of some examples. An example of like, the absolute worst to me, is Gothic 3. An example of something mid, is Dynasty Warriors (I don't like how it does difficulty in general, but man some of those movesets just feel great). A favorite is Monster Hunter, because it has two weapons with rhythms I like
Anything with cutscenes, esp. the ones with "Hold A to wipe your nose".
OK smart guy, what button would you map to Wipe Nose??? /s
"Press F to pay respects" is a meme for a reason - these types of cutscene actions were stupid from the start.
Hating all cutscenes does seem a little extreme though...
Fair point, I just don't like those cut-scene rich games. Topic of this thread is "irrational" after all ;)
Most of my game annoyances have already been covered, but my biggest one is around games with time limits. Now I'm not talking about puzzle games or races or things where a time limit is almost a requirement. I don't like being rushed and/or needing a guide or walkthrough to not missing things due to time constraints. A good example are RPGs with time limits, like the first Fallout, or in Persona 3 and after, or Majora's Mask. I remember Daggerfall's main story quest had fairly strict time limits. If you strayed into some dungeons or got distracted that was basically it, you couldn't do the story anymore, just play in the sandbox.
I now know to look for these before I spend money on a game at least.
When it comes to action games (think fighting games but not actual PvP sidescroller fighting games): not having a mechanic to instantly nullify an incoming attack's damage that isn't a dodge. Think DMC's Royal Guard, Sekiro's parry (or so I am told), or MGR's parrying. I love that gimmick of being able to turn combat into a razor-thin game of timing and prediction so much that if it isn't in an action game, I just want to go play one that has it.
Beyond that, while it's more of a general intense want, but the more options a game has, the more I like it. If the game options menu is a single page and just 6 settings, it's missing out.
I only have a couple.