Today we got up like vinegar. It may be a matter of the weather or the accumulated fatigue of the week, but I think that the addiction to a certain game during the weekend has also had something to blame. I am not here to stone specific names, mind you, but to talk about a general feeling that we can see in many different titles.
Several of the things in them remind me that the medium still has much to improve, especially in the big blockbusters in which it never hurts to ask for an additional push. It is normal that it never rains to everyone’s liking, but it would be appreciated if one day someone decided to leave all these behind Things I Hate Happening in a Video Game.
Let me take control of the action
The bomb counter starts to run and with its explosion they will reduce to ashes the bunker that I have cleaned of enemies during the last minutes. Running down the last hallway to the exit, I start to see sunlight, and as I reach the door, I start to think about how epic it’s going to be to jump off the cliff behind and open the squirrel suit. while everything explodes behind my back.
Unfortunately, when you get there, the game decides to cut you off from the action before jumping in to play a video of how everything explodes. Because? It’s no better than the 30 other explosions I’ve already seen in the game, and now instead of remembering what happened on that mission, all I can think of is the rage that that situation generated in me.
Pointless and endless plates
There is someone very bad who has done very bad things. kill him. With those words you could summarize many of the missions of sagas like Far Cry, but instead they prefer to give it a supposed depth and, for this, a random NPC (that you have seen once and will never hear from him again), He decides to tell you the story of his life so that you understand that there is someone very bad who has done very bad things and therefore deserves the worst of deaths.
Luckily, someone at Ubisoft decided to include a button to skip these badges so you can jump straight into the action with a short summary, but not all games are equally kind to this. A message on the radio as you head there, a voiceover that tells you all of the above, even a message that you can stop to read if you think it’s necessary. There are plenty of ways to skip those conversations or integrate them into the gamebut forcing yourself to stop what you’re doing to listen to some script lines that aren’t going to change your life is annoying.
escort missions
If there’s anything worse than an NPC tag, it’s an NPC tag that ends up on an escort mission in which you have to protect said NPC while he tells you about his life. Too bad there isn’t a button to tell you, “please don’t separate from me”. Perhaps that is why most limit themselves to looking for the best way to commit suicide, demonstrating no capacity for self-defense or self-esteem. They seem to think:where is death? Over there? Well I’m going”.
extensive cinematics
This overlaps a bit with that of the plates, but here instead of meaningless conversations you can talk about camera shots that lead nowhere. Sometimes, if you turn the volume up a lot and pay attention, during a sunset or a tracking shot that shows a city you can hear the art director saying: “Hey, you’ve seen that, it turned out great, right? Look at this plane, doesn’t it remind you of something?
Invisible walls and doors that don’t open
Let’s play a game. In this room there are four doors, and only one of them can be used. If the door doesn’t open, what did it cost to put up a wall? Better to see through a virtual hole how the players push themselves against doors waiting for something to happen. This annoys even more when you’re coming from blowing something up with an explosion and then you can’t break through a dingy door.
But if there’s one thing that can especially piss me off, it’s when those doors turn into runes that could be dodged in one jump or, directly, invisible walls that, with some luck, are accompanied by a message that reads: “you should look at that before you go here”. Because? Well, I want to go this way and that’s just another plate that I hoped I could get rid of by running in the opposite direction.
Messages that cover the screen
We jump to the past to recall a memory that comes from pearls. Let’s go back to Sea of Thieves for a few seconds. I accept a mission and I run to the map of the ship to see where I have to go, however there is a message alerting me that I have started a mission and it is right at the point where the name of the island I should go to appears . Better wait for the longest seconds that you remember having lived to pass and, then, now you can take a good look at what you should do next.
It’s just a small example, but I’m sure many of you have something similar in mind. The same goes for intrusive achievement messages that prevent you from reading lines of text or the like. problems of user interface that, with a little more love, surely they would never be a nuisance again.
Huge updates and patches
I have half an hour to play, do you really think I’m going to spend 10 minutes updating the game? If it’s an online game, you have no choice, of course, but even in that case there should be a way to manage those downloads.
In an ideal universe, the patches would come by portions: This part is the one that fixes bugs in the game, this one is the one that improves four textures that you will never pay attention to and this one is the one that includes side missions that don’t interest you in the slightest. The first thing is 2 MB that are downloaded in seconds, the sum of the rest goes up to 2 GB and they promise to annoy you part of the time you have to dedicate to a game.
In ExtraLife | The next big step for AI will not be to revolutionize the NPCs of your favorite RPG. already done it
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