Gaming

When there are several waterfalls in the game and not one has a secret behind it.

Can you bring up the pause menu at any point (including cut scenes).

I've always felt like a sign of a well polished game was one where the pause menu would work at any point, including during cutscenes.

When you can't tap a button to fill the text dialogue, and have to wait for each letter to individually populate for 15 speech bubbles in a row.

When the intro cannot be skipped after the first start.

Long cutscenes that don't let you save or pause when anything comes up that forces you to leave the keyboard or just focus elsewhere.

"Control" was the worst wrt this (or was it Quantum Break? Maybe both). I was just about to go to bed when it showed me a "cutscene" that went on for more than 30 minutes. Turned out later that you could actually go back to watch it again afterwards, but there was no indication of that at the time.

Quick Time Events; characters that automatically do 60 things just by holding down "forward" on the joystick; the Ubisoft logo.

When the game is such a precious labour of love, so obviously cared for, and constantly improved, that there’s no way the dev has any time left for gaming.

When going from point a to point b takes ages or is otherwise a pain. I get you worked hard on your world, but it losses its charm the 10th time running across it.

And don't force me to hold/tap a button to sprint. Or worse, make me click in the left stick.

Unskippable cutscenes. While I do love Soul Reaver's storytelling, sometimes I just want to skip the damn thing and get on with the adventure.

Walking simulators. The devs just wanted to tell a story, not make a game.

I’ll go first: when mouse sensitivity is unbalanced by default—horizontal movement is way faster than vertical—and the game only allows you to change the overall sensitivity for both axes together.

When maxing out the damage stat just makes your game trivially easy.

Stat systems are hard and prone to optimization problems. But c’mon, you at least gotta test the glass cannon build that you know everyone’s gonna try first.

I've been streaming recently, and one thing that stands out to me is when you first boot up a game and it doesn't have a start menu with settings.

I noticed it before, but now I really notice it. If something is wrong with the settings, sometimes that intro is unplayable or a less than optimal experience. So you have to try and skip, fix the issue, and then restart the game and try again. This seems to be more of a PC issue than a console issue, but even on consoles sometimes you need to adjust things like brightness or add subtitles

Singleplayer games with time-based farming simulator minigames you won't complete without gaming the date\time in your system (easter eggs are welcome tho). Grindy platinum achievements well outside even a dedicated minority's norms, just getting bigger numbers or save skamming for opposing endings. Button-mashers with an undisclosed randomization of a final result under the hood.

The replies here feel more like "list of game features that I do not like"

Pc version of open world exploration game without quicksave key. There's a lot of wrong with Grounded, but man i feels like Obsidian really losing touch with PC game with this one.

When a freshly installed game starts at max volume

When things aren't balanced. It either tells me the devs do not play their game or they have a dominant strategy and don't bother playing anything else.

I've heard stories from professionals and you would be surprised how many devs don't actually play the game they are developing.

One thing, and it's likely just an oversigt, but controls. With Consoles being the computers that everything is designed for, the lack of proper controls for Mouse & Keyboard have become a bit of a nuisance.

Normally, it's not a big deal. You just configure them yourself.

But it did irk me some when I gave Cyberpunk a go and tried to switch the Interact/select button from (F) to (E) and it didn't move both functionalities. Now (E) was Interact, but in menus it defaulted back to (F) as if menu select was a different function.

Don't know if it's due to not playing games, but why tf is motion blur almost always on by default?

They work for Ubisoft or Bethesda

I wouldn't really say it's the devs for most of the stuff I see that has me questioning if whoever was in charge ever played a video game before. Stupidly simply QOL things that end up being absent in a game that is ripping off another game, likely only absent because the dev team didn't have time to work on those elements.

However, games that constantly take control away from the player like every 2-5 minutes, I have to question the designer themselves. I wanted to play a game and these kinds of games end up getting watched like a movie with how often you don't have any control over what's happening. And I don't mean games like Detroit Become Human or even The Quarry (which is 100℅ an interactive movie), I mean shit like Dragon's Dogma 2 or a lot of the newest Nintendo first party titles. It takes away controk of your character for some of the stupidest shit; like high fiving your team mates without any input from the player.