As a gamer you could spend forty minutes or forty hours with a game and still have an idea about whether you like the game or not.  On the occasion that you might discuss the game casually with a friend you might say something like “the story sucks” or “what’s up with the camera angle, I died like five times trying to jump off of that cliff last night”.  Pet peeves are ubiquitous, but gaming pet peeves are something special.  It’s hard to find a game that doesn’t fall into some pet peeve category and even the best developers, like film producers and musicians alike, succumb to following some common patterns that will make a passionate community respond with memes galore.

5) Story Cliches

I’m sure that you’ve watched at least one movie recently with the same plot as the movie that you saw last summer, or heard some songs that are about loving a girl on the radio 30 times in the past few days.  It’s impossible to avoid certain cliches because they sell so well; we can’t avoid them, in fact they are inherent to our culture.  Video games are no different.  Story mode is where the player experiences an adventure solo and his or her experience should feel like a well-paced, non-repetitive timeline through the game’s events.  Pacing issues are one thing, but cliches are often overused and we, as gamers, expect them much like film and music critics do.  I would give this a frustration factor of about 3 because we come to foresee such things as gamers.  On the flip side, gamers still praise games with cliche story arcs, even rating them among best of the year at times.  Take a game like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune; it’s about a treasure hunter that seeks the lost city of gold, “El Dorado”, and throughout the game he finds himself separated from his allies and a love interest develops when he reconnects with one of them and the game ends with a happily ever after finale… TEXTBOOK.  This game was probably the first amazing game I played on the PS3 in 2007 and it was because of how they told the story not why they told it.  Uncharted was praised for its generation defining graphics and gameplay; it also didn’t hurt that its cliche filled story was still very polished and well-paced.  Here’s one of my favorite cutscenes from the game (SPOILER ALERT).

4) Sparse Checkpoints

Checkpoints exist for two reasons: first, to allow some progress during long or difficult sections of the game in the case of recurring death or lack of supplies like ammunition in action games, etc. and second to allow for progress when a player can’t play for extended periods of time.  Certain games allow the player to save at any time from the in-game menus, while some opt for game checkpoints where the game saves automatically for you, others have you searching for terminals or typewriters, for example to save your game through exploration, and most games have a manual way to save in the game and an auto-save feature to make it easy for you to save your progress.  Progress is the main goal in almost every game and when sparsely placed checkpoints make the game difficult on normal settings it can be very frustrating.  I would like to point out that horror games are exempt from this category because a lack of frequent checkpoints can add to the already present despair that is inherent to the horror genre.  Frustration factor: 4.5 and take this with a little bit of salt.  Games that make progress difficult for no reason are not fun to play, especially when checkpoints are hard enough to come by on normal difficulty.

A game that reflects this idea of a sparse and broken checkpoint system is Call of Duty: World at War.  In this game you play as both a Soviet soldier fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front and an American Soldier fighting the Japanese during World War II.  This game was one of the many Call of Duty games that had an extremely frustrating respawn system for the enemy AI.  The game basically spawned enemies until your character crossed a certain line during major gun battles, thereby making the game bearable on normal, if you were a seasoned enough player, and nigh impossible on Veteran difficulty.  I died so many times trying to complete certain missions on Veteran just because the enemies seemed infinite and I would run out of ammo and eventually die.  Watch this person and how carefully they play to beat the mission (BLOOD AND GORE ALERT)  Despite the issues presented with sparse or poorly conceived checkpoints, this pet peeve is slowly going away as game developers hand-hold consumers through their games nowadays.  Want to feel accomplished?  Beat a game from ten years ago when checkpoints were meant to be hard to reach.  It’s just a sign that times are changing.

3) Fetch Quests

Click on the picture for a GIF

Fetch quests are just plain annoying.  Who in their right mind would do the same type of mission over and over and over again?  This boils down to a test between a your patience and your willingness to finish the game and/or reach endgame content (ie. max level cap, harder campaign).  This has a frustration factor of 6.5 because of its massive consumption of a gamer’s time.  Some gamers don’t have much time to play, so why would they pay for a game that cost $60 just to do the same tasks over and over again.  These games are seldom boring, but if you want to get your money’s worth you have to jump through the same set of hoops dozens of times before finishing all of the game’s content.  This can be a good thing for gamers that don’t buy games very often, but for those of us that buy an average of one game every month it feels like we are being cheated.  Seasoned gamers know which games are repetitive on purpose and which are not, yet sometimes the hype behind a game may cloud our opinions and after the purchase we realize the developer may have misled the gaming community as to how much original content there actually is.  There is a BIG difference between a 20 hour unique campaign with a 50 hour full completion and a game where 7 of those 20 hours are go-here get-this objectives.  Games like Rage and Borderlands dance on the fence by making the player go back and forth between already explored areas to recover materials.  While both games have their merits they sometimes fall short of convincing the player that these activities are worth their time.

2) Weird Camera Angles

This issue ranks higher than the previous ones for pure and immediate frustration.  You know whats more annoying than issues that are part of the games structure that you can’t change?  A technical issue that is only a problem if you haven’t mastered it.  Camera angles are one of the most important parts of how a game is played because it determines how you control your character thereby determining how you experience the game.  Certain games like Resident Evil have fixed camera angles as an aesthetic choice (usually in horror games), but some just have unintuitive camera controls, turning the mastery of the camera into another obstacle that the player must face to complete the game.  A good example of such camera issues would be Super Mario 64.  This video shows a player dying several times due to sudden camera angle shifts among other things.  Also, popular in the PlayStation 2 and Xbox  generation was a fixed movement camera where the player is not in control of the camera, but it moves in-game according to movement; Van Helsing would be an excellent example of this type of camera.  I’d give this issue a frustration factor of about 7 since its not common, but if it is a problem then it can ruin the game for you.  At the end of the day you can deal with a lapse in continuity and a couple of repetitive missions, but a faulty camera can turn off a lot of players a game and therefore demand reconstruction of the next game’s mechanics or discontinue the series, if one was planned, altogether.

1) RNG Loot

Do you think his kill:death ratio deserves a purple, legendary engram which can take hours to receive in other ways… NO HE DOES NOT!!! This was completely RANDOM too.

  Welcome to, quite possibly, the most frustrating, and at the same time most rewarding, system to give players loot I have ever experienced.  I experienced the pain and gain of Random Number Generated loot when I started playing Bungie’s new first-person/MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game hybrid, Destiny.  Destiny is the primary game I am playing now and I plan to write up a review of the game soon (stay up to date so you don’t miss it!!), and despite its many flaws it is one of the most enjoyable games I have played in a long time.  One aspect of it that brings both screams of excruciating pain and uplifting joy is its system of randomly assigning rewards to its players.  This pet peeve gets a frustration factor of 8.5 due to the extreme disparity between the emotions it can evoke from players. Having played Destiny for about 4.5 days I can tell you from personal experience that randomly generated loot can make you feel like ten hours of grinding was worth nothing, and one lucky span of ten minutes can put you ahead of a friend instantly.  Basically the game drops blueprints for weapons during gameplay and when you bring them to a vendor called the Cryptarch, the RNG that rules his behavior, gives you a reward based on the rarity of the blueprint.  Up until a couple of weeks ago the game would allow for rewards even below the level of rarity of a given blueprint, which means you get worse gear from better blueprints.  RIDICULOUS!!  A glance at the first meme above the comic strip shows a player who did not play well at all getting a very rare blueprint, legendary in fact.   A recent update fixed this and made it so that rarity is directly associated with the blueprint you get… no more anti climax when cashing in a blueprint.  Nothing worse than getting gipped by the system for a week and hearing your friend that just bought the game last night already got an extremely rare weapon.  Well played RNG, well played!