Gaming Pet Peeves

unpausable cutscenes. Nothing bugs me more than getting interrupted in the middle of a cutscene and not being able to press escape to pause the cutscene. You're forced to try to split your attention between what interrupted you and the cutscene or restart and see the cutscene from the beginning again.

Extra annoyance points if escape immediately skips the cutscene without any indication it's going to.

All this. Everyone focuses on not being able to skip a cutscene but not being able to pause it is even worse for me, especially when trying to pause actually does skip the cutscene.
- Being able to replay a cutscene would also be nice.
Another one is QTE in the middle of a cutscene, ugh.
For me, it’s cutscenes in general. I know there are people who do care in general, but for me a game where I care about the plot is very rare. And the examples I can think of (Outer Wilds, or Ico, for two examples) either have no cutscenes or very few brief ones, and tell the story in a different, more immersive way.
For me, a general rule is - if the game forces moments on me when I can put the controller down and wander into a different room, then that’s not what I’m interested in. I want to actually play the game.
Extra annoyance points if escape immediately skips the cutscene without any indication it’s going to.
Rage inducing absolutely.
- I'm up-voting as hard as I can...
I never pause cuscenes, not because I don't want to ever but because I'm always afraid I'll skip it instead.
My wife has the unique ability to always want my attention during cutscenes.

Follow this character to the objective
Walking
Too slow
Running
Too fast

jfkajfADAHSVb

And then there are games that seamlessly matches your pace and animation with the NPC once you get close to them. cooms
Aah, i think it was tie-fighter, where you could lock on and press a key to match speeds with an enemy - (albeit instantaneous only). Maybe it was there in x-wing, but i feel like it was one of the minor qol improvements in tie-fighter that made it better.
- I think about that surprisingly often. Also how nice would that be in real life too, not just games.
- They ported it over to X-Wing in later versions. Also, play XWVM, if you haven't already.
I cannot fathom how Bethesda still can't get this right. It can't be difficult to just set NPC speed to match player speed.
- it just works
- It's supposed to guarantee you can always catch up with them.

Needing to log into an online account to play a single-player game.

When a single-player game keeps pausing to tell me it can't connect to the server.

Especially when this happens in small indie games.
You were the chosen one Anakin!

Not being able to pause or save at any point.

I'm a "grown-up" these days, but I grew up with games and they're part of my life, and I love them - but in the larger scale of things, they're still toys. The requirements of a pet/partner/child/phone call/doorbell will ~~always~~ nearly always outrank them.

"We don't let you pause because it's a simulation and and you can't pause real life so it means the game is more realistic" = piss off

The simulation part tbh makes little sense to me, at least if I pause by going on the menu. Unless it's multiplayer there's little reason for you to prevent me to pause on menu, even if your aim is to be as realistic as possible.
At the end of the day it's still a game and if I feel overwhelmed or the need to pause for whatever reason give me the option to. The people who want absolutely 0 pause can simply not go on the menu or if you really want you can put an option to disable pause on menu IG. Or yk they could do whatever they're simulating IRL, within reason.
Yeah, or you can pause the game by opening the menu, but not when you're in dialogue, when it matters most.
- Long cutscene that you've tried so hard to reach. Will pressing start pause the game or skip it forever?
One thing I love about the Nintendo Switch, you can suspend any game at any time (except online multiplayer ofc) with a single button press
- Yeah, the Steam Deck is actually pretty good for this on most games.
  On a computer, you can, I suppose, set up a keyboard shortcut to pause the process, but you still think "this should just be part of the game in the first place".
During EA for Hades 2 if you paused while fighting the god of time he would say "I control time here!" And unpause the game. It was funny, but if I need to answer my door I don't want to lose my run. Thankfully that has been changed.

Games that wont let you quit to desktop in game.

I've noticed this is especially bad in Japanese games for whatever reason.
- PC Gaming market in Japan is treated like Second Class Gaming Citizens, sadly
Alaternatively, PUBG lets you quit to desktop from the in-game pause menu, and I've hit it accidentally so many times.
- flashbacks to The Forest pause menu having the exit game button in the same place as the back button*
  So many times I backed out of settings by double clicking and accidentally closed the entire game and thus the multiplayer lobby I was hosting
May I introduce you to my good old friend: alt+F4 😬
- in old dos games "boss key" was usually ctrl+b or ESC
  I never understood the point until I grew up a bit.
Honestly this is my favorite feature of the Steam Deck and SteamOS. I can (and do) even shut down the entire PC in the middle of a game.

Lack of accessibility options, not unlike you.

Most games are better about this now, but subtitles, difficulty options, and the ability to turn off flashing lights are critical to the point I can’t play for long, sometimes at all without them.

Thank you for saying difficulty as an accessibility feature. So many people think difficulty is something inherent to a game's design but completely miss the fact that difficulty is subjective.
Every game should have difficulty options. No exceptions.
- Granular difficulty options also help. Things like being able to make the parry timings easier or harder than that rest of the difficulty.
  If your difficulty presets are turning a bunch of levers at once, letting folks make their own can be very helpful.
  There's also things that aren't often considered difficulty, but that can definitely make a game harder for some folks.
  With Witcher 3 the only way I was able to play it successfully was modding it to be able to ignore a bunch of mechanics I found tedious. Things like ignoring carry weight, turning off item durability, lengthening potion duration, having items scale to my level, and hoovering up loot. Inventory management is often exhausting for me.
  It's not an easy fix this can break a game's economy, and I think I had separate mods to reduce the impact of that.
- I disagree with the idea that every game should have a difficulty option. If the difficulty is there just for the sake of challenge, then difficulty options should be there because in that case it's not all that different than setting self-imposed rules for additional difficulty. But when difficulty serves a bigger purpose I can absolutely understand keeping a standardized experience.
  For example in ARC raiders the ARC are so dangerous that they've pushed people underground and going topside is this risky endeavor. But if the ARC were pushovers you get this narrative dissonance where the enemy is supposed to be so dangerous that humans can't thrive but when you fight them they die instantly so why can't humans thrive? ARC also pose as a balancing act to the game because if the ARC weren't dangerous the game would just be PVP with looting. You have to take ARC seriously even if you know how to deal with them because of how easily the script can be flipped on you. ARC raiders obviously doesn't really have difficulty options because of its multiplayer nature but it does show that difficulty can have a narrative impact and difficulty can impact how you approach the game. If the game was easier it would arguably end up as a worse experience.
  And difficulty can also be used to make you feel a certain way. This is why I've argued against Dark Souls needing difficulty options (and to be clear, I'm talking about ONLY Dark Souls 1). There's a reason some people call Dark Souls a cathartic experience, because that's what the game is going for. Lordran is a world in despair. The end of an era is coming and the world has been plunged into decay. The denizens of Lordran have fallen into despair, given up and hollowed. And Dark Souls wants you to feel that. Dark Souls wants you to feel the despair and find the will to continue despite that despair, lest you become one of the hollowed people of Lordran. The game is challenging specifically to make you feel like you're being treated unfairly, like you're against impossible odds, like you're supposed to fail, like there's no point playing and just give up and never play again. Because when you eventually overcome that unfair and impossible scenario you've failed a dozen times all the emotional tension gets released and you achieve catharsis. If you don't feel the failure you can't feel the catharsis thus by making the game easier the game loses a part of what it is.
  Dark Souls is not just a game, Dark Souls is a piece of art. We give other art the respect to be their own thing. People accept Kafka novels are hard to read. People accept The Downward Spiral is hard to listen. People accept Requiem for a dream is hard to watch. But when Dark Souls is hard to play we complain? I say let art be art. If we want to treat games as art then every game can't have difficulty options. Some games can, will and do use difficulty in a way that elevates their artistic vision. In my eyes denying games the tool of difficulty is to deny that games can be art.
- Good games have a difficulty curve that scales, usually they just speed up level by level.
  "Life is just like tetris, it just gets harder, then you die." - Mark Twain
  You can't make an 'easy' mode for tetris, but you could effectively start at level minus 10 or something.
- Well I think your mom only has easy mode.
In a similar vein, games that have sounds for everything. I have to play with sounds off in games I enjoy, and some sounds are used to foreshadow dangers that I end up unaware of because I can't deal with the sound of crickets or bees or a random humming that are always present. (Shout out to Satisfactory for the incredibly granular sound control, overwhelming at first, but once it was set up it is great.)
Remapping keys. I have function (and not always voluntary) but no feeling in part of my left hand, and an essential tremor that appears randomly. I need to disable some keys because I will find my character suddenly crouching/running/attacking or whatever at really inconvenient times, and with some games the controls are so touchy that I can't aim or move in a straight line.
Not colorblind, but some games have some very headache inducing colour choices, I have sympathy for those who can't see colour A font on Colour B background.

Showing a long plot-explaining intro right after start, before I have a chance to get to "options" and set the resolution, subtitles, etc. I also "love" unskippable short logo videos at start. And a few screens with only "press any button to continue".

Unskipable splash screens are the worst.
- Luckily, at least in my experience, most of those are just a .mkv that you can either rename or delete and the game will just skip it entirely. Unfortunately that can't be done on consoles

Logins. I hate games with accounts. Just let me play.

oh, hey, you haven't launched this game in a year
please download and install the new launcher. please login to the new launcher. your login does not work, please go to the website to reactivate your account. you must restart your system to reset the launcher login screen. please wait a full minute for the launcher to finish loading. please wait thirty seconds for us to process your login credentials. please wait fifteen seconds for us to begin the process of launching the game.
- I want to punch your comment.

When the only difference in difficulty is either by adding more waves of enemies, or giving bosses a bajillion hitpoints.

If I already learned all the game mechanics, and the only scaling is having to repeat them a lot more, that's poor design.

I dont mean this as much for adjustable difficulty, like easy vs hard mode, but rather in game progression...

I'd also make that complaint about adjustable difficulty, but to speak to the game progression, I have to agree.
Games should be teaching players what they're getting into from the very beginning. The tutorial should be "When you do everything right, this is how easy the game is. When it's not this easy, it means you're doing something wrong". That "wrong" thing could be messing up a mechanic, not upgrading your character enough, or you're trying to go to a later area too early. It's a teaching moment.
So many games today, at "Normal" difficulty, will throw players into combat encounters where they just basically kill everything in one hit. So players in the tutorial think "This is a bit too easy, I'm going to up the difficulty to Hard", but then they don't realize that everything gets harder when you exit the tutorial, and then over the course of the game the difficulty keeps outpacing your progression.
As far as the difficulty slider goes, I think it's always better when harder modes just make you easier to kill, rather than enemies being more difficult to kill. There's often a good balance that can be struck between the two, but too many games just opt for just making enemies tankier and tankier, which ends up turning the "difficulty" slider into a "time/resources waster" slider.
Cries in shadow warrior

WHY THE HELL ARE GAMES SO LOUD ON STARTUP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????

There are others but this is one I just can't believe is a thing. It's so fucking simple to fix. Just start the volume on the lower end and if it's too quiet I can raise the volume or just give me a volume slider first thing on initial load before any sound is played and let me find the right levels with a test sound before playing any menu music or something.

This and full white dev/publisher logo screens. I have a pretty large HDR monitor and whenever I boot up a Bandai Namco game I’ll flashback myself if I don’t look away in time.
Isn't this what the volume on your sound system is supposed to do? Master volume in a game should be pretty much maxed out by default and the volume on whatever you use to output the sound should be set so loud isn't blowing your ears out.
Unless you are actually complaining about sound levels of stuff that shouldn't be loud (like menu clicking or background music) but that's relative sound levels of different categories in the game, not the master volume.
- Nah, I get what they are saying; games are just unusually loud. I can have my sound system's volume when streaming YouTube or something on my PS5 set to a decent level but when I switch to a game I have to cut the volume in half if I haven't messed with the settings yet.
  Idk why this is a thing but it is.
Reminds me of the first time I booted up Elden Ring. The title screen started up and I heard some music, but it was so quiet. I turned up the volume and then a second later thought I almost blew out the speakers on my headset.
Context for anyone who has not heard the title music for Elden Ring.
I've noticed more and more indie devs at least have begun to set master volume lower by default. I appreciate that.

The fact that games act like climbing doesn't exist. You reach a path blocked by a small rock that any normally able bodied human could climb and it just pisses me off.

Like Pokémon games with a rock you could easily just walk around but noooo you gotta travel to this other town to get a special item or learn a special skill to get around this thing you could easily climb over or walk around.

It's even worse in VR games. As much as I love Half Life Alyx, there were certain barriers that are literally just a pile of rubble or a chain link fence.

Artificial difficulty. If I can only finish a game by grinding for hours on end or after endless tedious fetch quests, I am going to be very disappointed. Like there'd better be something else real strong in the title's favor or I'm likely to drop it altogether.

There was a time when making games more difficult by way of time investment made more sense from a design angle, but that time has long since passed. It's just lazy design in 9/10 cases these days.

Points of no return and anything else that's permanently missable. No, I am not doing a second playthrough of a 100 hour JRPG.

It really depends of the implementation for me.
I completelly understand that if you take a mission where you kill a merchant, you loose the option to purchace from them or miss their questline etc. Its a story point where your acts changed the world.
But if you miss some unique loot item from dungeon you can go trough only once, because, it was too well hidden or it was behind some convoluted puzzle that you missed, im pissed.
Especially when there is some kind of “open every treasure chest” type of achievement, with one or two things locked out. So if you miss them in your initial playthrough, you’re completely locked out of that achievement until you replay it from the beginning.
- Skyrim has a collectible item that is found in a main story area that is only accessible once. Its a very early mission and in one of the last thief's guild quests they will tell you to get that item. That might be 200h after you did that main quest ...
  Good thing modding exists
Final fantasy 9 comes to mind but I know all of them are guilty of it
Trails in the Sky has some interesting logic behind this where the gameplay serves the story.
You’ll do some quests for people who actually end up being evil later in the plot. There’s also party members who temporarily join you while they have time off from their other job - then as the story progresses, their “lunch break is over” and they go back to their life. So, if you try to save content for later, it won’t be there anymore.
Those little things end up putting more focus on what is accessible at a given moment, so a level 60 player isn’t going back to the starting area to wrap up quests he doesn’t care about for completion.
I hadn’t had any games like this for a while until stalker 2. at the end I just wanted to be able to chill in the zone, hunt mutants and find artifacts but nah game over.

When rebinding the keys, the game wont let me save the changes unless everything has something assigned.
During character creation the lightning on the model is completely different what you will see in game and I end up with an ugly character (Dragon's Dogma, Saints Row 3 remaster, etc.)

Games that refuse to let you change the difficulty once you begin a game. More broadly, single player games that worry too much about preserving some sort of honor associated with doing well and make it annoying to play. Like rougue likes that have no save and quit for fear of people save scumming.

Text scaling in game where text is plot critical.

Important for things like steamdeck, some marked "verified" should be downgraded to "playable" due to the text size and inability to scale it.

And timed, text heavy games on mobile generally.
Squinting at you, Hearthstone.

Unrealistic loot.

Like when you kill a wolf and get shotgun shells as loot.

But also more subtle stuff like enemies in a remote place that don't carry or have any kind of food and drink with them.

And when the enemy is clearly carrying a weapon, but it's not lootable and you get some random stuff instead.

Reminds of the old pile of gold (empty) meme
- In Hades II, there is a zone which has sentient gold bag enemies and flood littered with gold. Neither of these things provide you gold apart from standard drop rates.
I think shotgun slugs would be good loot from a werewolf, but they should be a junk item or a crafting item to combine with gunpowder and casings to make new ammo, not ready to use shells that's just silly why does a werewolf have those?

spongy bosses don't always mean they're challenging. I can't count how many times I've fought a boss who isn't hard or interesting but just wastes time cause they have a ton of health.

mechanics matter.

I love my older retro games, like I'm a huge Metroid fan, but jebus to Betsy, they fall for this trapping all too often.
I don't fault them, those were the Wild West of gaming when devs were still figuring things out, but damn does it make going back to older games a bit rough.

Quests that demand that the player finds X of an unimportant item in a world which has exactly X instances of said item. Thankfully most games nowadays will offer up more of said item than needed to complete the quest, so that one doesn’t end up scouring the map over and over again, in search of that elusive last bottle/scroll/pigeon, because nobody got time for that. And not even talking about optional collectathon quests for those who want that sort of thing, some games would have this sort of quest in the main storyline.

It's OK. You can say crimson nirnroot.
- Why must you remind me of this repressed memory? The reward wasn't even fucking worth it.
To add, give me some way of tracking these collectables.
If I've collected all of the trinkets in a given area, mark that area in some way. If there are 100 trinkets, number them and give me a list. Give me a map, hints, thing that beeps, something.
I don't need any of the above to be unlocked from the start. You can add it in the post game or after I've collected some percentage of them or make it a side quest.
It's annoying going online and someone has posted "I found 99 of 100 things, where else to look?" and basically no one can help them. It's annoying being that person, to be so close and yet so far.

Games you can't pause. I love Dark Souls, but PLEASE give me a real pause button !

I'm okay with the inventory not pausing, that's part of the game design. I'm not okay with the fact I can't pause at all, so if my neighbour rings for their spare key when I'm fighting Kalameet I just have to die 🤷🏻‍♀ (true story btw)

Games that don't allow you to pause and skip cutscenes.

I don't want to have to miss half of the cutscenes just because someone interrupted me or the phone rang or something half way through. Alternatively, when I'm on my 23rd replay of a game, I do not want to have to sit through every cutscenes I already know by heart.

Oh, and modern games that allow manual saving at any time, not having any kind of regular auto save (looking at you here BG3).

If you're fine from a gameplay pov with having the player save whenever, then there's really no good reason whatsoever to not have one or two auto save slots that get saved every 10-20 minutes or so, at least as an option in the menu. ESPECIALLY in open world games (like BG3...) where you can easily go literal hours at a time without hitting a checkpoint save. And yes, I am still salty over learning about BG3's lack of regular auto save when I lost like 2.5 hours of progress on my first run.

I do not want to have to sit through every cutscenes I already know by heart.
Forget it, there's no way you're taking Kairi's heart!
I wanted to love Monster Hunter World, but jesus, I could not skip anything on it.
Games that don’t allow you to pause and skip cutscenes.
This is the main reason I cannot replay Valkyrie Profile

No save option during stealth sequences or generally in stealth-heavy games. Allow me the option to either improvise and enjoy messing up or plan and execute and test every section of a stealth route carefully without having to replay the mission a thousand times, especially when the slightest hiccup will have the whole mission going awry. If that leads to some people save-scumming their way through the entire mission, so be it. Let them play their way.

Multiple un-skippable product and company credits at the start. Show a blinking “Loading…” if that is what is going on but let me skip this stuff on the second start onward.

Indepth tutorials told by dialogue boxes. Run 5 steps.

[Hey player!]

[You know some boxes can be moved right?]

[Just walk up to the box]

camera pans 3 feet to the left to show the box in the centre of the screen

[Press X to grab it]

[And when youre done press X to let go]

[Im sure youll find many uses for this during your adventure]

[Why not try it on that box over there?]

<hmmmm. Seems like im going to need to move that *box* if I want to get anywhere>

When you get near the box a massive X symbol flashes madly and unmissably above your head, and theres lines on the floor showing where it needs to be pushed to, which is also the only way its programmed to move, literally impossible to do wrong, and you push it like 5 feet.

[Wow! You did it! Looks like you can get to the next area now!]

<I should probably remember that, it could be useful in the future>.

You're now free to play the game, all the way to the next room, where you'll spend way longer than necessary learning something a fucking 4 year old could figure out, and you dont even need figured out because its been a staple of games since before you were even born.

This is my peeve, over-tutorializing.
I know there are folks out there who are profoundly bad at games, and that's who these things are made for. I'm reminded of that one gaming journalist who gave Cuphead a bad review because he couldn't figure out how to double jump and never got out of the tutorial.
But just make it a quick selection when starting a new game. "I'm new here, show me guides" and "I'm an expert, skip tutorial content". Or even just make the tutorials an optional object interaction in the game that you don't have to touch if you've already figured it out.
But the best games are the ones that teach players how to play organically. Level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros is the common example. Setting the camera controls in the older Halo games was also a work of genius. Newer games are a bit too dense to be able to cover everything quite as quickly and organically as Mario, but you can still offer some similar diegetic hints and just add a little "Help" button for anyone who can't figure it out on their own.
- Thats seriously mental to me. Who the hell can write about games while unable to even double jump?
  Its like being a music journalist and not even hearing about the Beatles.

Cutscenes that can't be paused, especially if they're longer than 10 seconds.

Do you have the slightest idea how frustrating it is to be mid-cutscene, something else requires my attention, and I cannot fucking pause it? Singlehandedly my biggest gripe with gaming.

Same with unskippable cutscenes, especially before a difficult boss. It's no fun to have to sit through it over and over if I'm struggling with said boss, or have to sit through a cutscene I've seen several times in previous playthroughs. This also applies to the game's credits.
- "It is I, Ansem"
Yeah, when the start button instead just skips the cutscene with no additional prompt? Extremely annoying!
Unskippable cutscenes at boss fights. God forbid the boss kills you.
I'm always afraid to test ESC during a cutscene because I've been burned by games that auto skip cutscenes when you hit ESC. Who does that.

I want to GIT GUD but I'm not the kind of person who can dodge and parry while managing a stamina bar. ER and DS games look awesome but I really can't do much sightseeing in them. I tried Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and in all of them I hit a wall against the first miniboss who I should be learning to parry on. I've always leaned toward dodging taking priority before parrying and a stamina bar limits that.

I recently played through Ghost of Tsushima and parried a thousand cuts. The game doesn't have stamina though. I understand stamina as a game mechanic but find all it adds is tedium. There's what I believe to be some good games hiding behind a stamina bar. I can enjoy the games until the stamina bar runs out and then I'll be thinking about enjoying a different game.

Odd take. Resource management is key in a lot of games to the entire design of how they play.
I play heavy tank builds in those games and block/dodge instead of parrying. It's just a different mindset I guess to enjoy that level of resource managing to know when to commit and when to back off and get defensive, especially when my attacks take a chunk of stamina and are slow to wind up. It forces the player to be strategic so you don't leave yourself winded mid string.
I guess what I call strategic playing you call tedium. To each their own.
The thing I hate about parrying games is that there's rarely ever any consistency about what you can and cannot parry and also never any way for you to learn if you're parrying too early or too soon or what.
- Lies of P did a great job of color coding things (and generally being more leinent/realistic with timing). It can still be a hard game, but the most approachable parrying based game of that ilk.
  *for me at least
Parrying is not mandatory in any of those games, maybe try approaching them differently? Also, invest in endurance, problem solved!

Anything that needlessly makes me repeat content I already beat or similarly wastes my time. Some examples are:

Fixed save points in general.

Unskippable cutscenes between the last fixed save point and the boss fight.

No autosave or fixed save point after a boss fight.

Preventing me from backtracking after I stumbled into a cut scene and/or boss fight because it wasn't obvious which path led to a point of no return.

Oh, and no Play Station style controller glyphs. Come on, it's an additional set of images, now hard can it be to implement?

Fixed save points in general.
To be fair, non-fixed savepoints introduce a bunch of additional work, especially on the gameplay design and testing sides, and for some games that work is better invested into other aspects of the game.
But if savepoints are fixed, they have to be frequent enough to not become an issue.

I’ve got perhaps an unusual one - 99% of the time I play games with the music turned off. I just find it much more immersive and I enjoy, for example, not knowing that combat is about to start because the music’s just changed.

There are plenty of games where you can’t turn the music off. I’m not a fan of that, but I get it. The devs want you to play their game in a certain way, and turning the music off isn’t part of that. No complaints.

But then there are games which allow you to turn the music off, but all the rest of the sound has been made under the assumption that the music will be playing. The music often covers up a litany of jankiness like background sound effects not looping well. And sometimes the atmosphere sounds (say the drone of an engine in a spaceship) are also controlled by the music slider.

So, if you’re going to give the option to turn the music off, make sure that the game still sounds good without the music.

You should be useful in beta testing for sound simply because you prefer no music. That's kind of neat
I'm a muted game player as well. Music is the first thing I turn down to negligible, followed environmental sounds. If I can't control those, buhbye all sounds.
In the murder hobo games, I don't really need to listen to that anyways.

Too many games are "survival" games now which really means they will make you do a bunch of chores to get to the sub par shooter or adventure game the chores gate you from. No, I don't want to chop wood and get rope or whatever for the 50th game that never innovates on any of these mechanics to get to the "good part"

Also lots of fun games seem to be ruined because they are battle royales.

Survival mechanics only work when the elements are the main antagonist like in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (the zombies are just obstacles blocking my path to the fridge)

Excessive reliance on audio recordings and written text for storytelling / world building. Oh look another game where I’m alone in this world and I have to listen to a ton of audio recordings or collect snippets of text throughout the entire game to learn anything about this world and what happened to it!

If anything, let it be audio, not text, I’m tired of reading through often very subpar writing, I just glaze over it. Better yet, have actual (skippable) voice actors read any text out loud. Ideally, weave all that info into the game’s main storyline or side quests, and have it communicated to the player via interesting NPCs. Also, use environmental storytelling more than info-dumps. Show, don’t tell.

Text/in-world notes/memos/books and found audio recordings have a place but don’t let that be the main way of learning about the world or my place in it.

I understand it’s also a budget issue, so I’ll cut indie games some slack.

I agree on everything except the audio over text bit. If it has to be anything, let it be text. Let me be able to skim it if I want, don't make me sit through an audio file to get background lore.
If it isn't gonna be presented through the actual storytelling of the gameplay, put it in a text file.
- Yeah I get it, but I like having the option of having a voice actor narrate the text to me rather than having to read everything. Especially as I mostly game on a TV that was not meant for reading.
I'd prefer text over audio, so long as I can skip the text when I am done reading. (Grr argh to the games that have both, but won't let me skip because the NPC isn't done speaking.)
Being able to choose either as the primary information delivery would be fantastic.
- True, reading is faster. Narrating I find more pleasant, more engaging if done well. But that’s personal opinion. So having an option would be great. And yes to making dialogues or narration skippable. I think most games do that nowadays. To be honest, if I am really immersed and interested and the voice acting is top notch I may not skip at all. But that should be left to the player to decide.
I like the way bioshock did it
I like the way bioshock did a lot of things (1 & 2, anyways)

Overly-long, unskippable credits.

Chaotic good:
Make it skippable but "Let's put an achievement for watching the whole credits"
Something something Kairi's heart something something Riku! Something something

If the game supports voice chat in-game, then it is not ok to play background music while talking in-game. Just mute yourself and don't make us listen. It's the same as people walking around neighborhood and blasting their music from their phone as if they're the only ones with ears.

I'm left-handed. Key rebinding has gotten better in some ways throughout the evolution of gaming, but it has recently regressed in the past few years.

I make custom layouts for every game I play. IJKL to move, Semicolon to sprint, Quote to crouch, M to interact, etc. I find many games where "I" is hard-bound to inventory, some bindings overlap keys I've bound with no way of fixing without going outside the game, some keys are unable to rebound entirely in-game, some keybindings menus require jank to actually work, some keybindings menus completely glitch out as I change entries, some games require .ini edits, some keys seem like they are working fine rebound, but completely bug out in unique ways, some games allow keys to be bound with modifiers (e.g. Shift + Mouse Button) and some don't, and so forth.

It's very frustrating. I can only imagine what people with physical disabilities and assistive devices deal with if it's this hard for me. I've tried using my right-hand for my mouse and WASD, but I get way too much pain doing so - even if I could properly learn to use a computer and game that way. I can't use WASD and my left-hand on the mouse as it is incredibly painful.

I just have to imagine this is all the case because QA is nonexistent and developers are overworked.

I can only imagine what people with physical disabilities and assistive devices deal with if it's this hard for me.
I learned AutoHotkey and I genuinely couldn't play many of the games I do without it.
- Unfortunately, some games seem to monitor keyboard activity directly, not letting AutoHotkey assignments take effect.
- Same, but I left Windows. On Linux/Wayland, it's a bit more difficult and less powerful with current tools. AHK can't be beat right now over here.
When the game let's you rebind some but not all keys it is like spraying lemon on the wound, at least when no key is refundable you can guess they could not be arsed to do it, but when they just do a shitty job on it is like it was almost there, why not do it right?
- Yeah, really. Like a lot of games refuse to let me (re)bind:
  1 through 0 [ ] ; ' , . / \ Backspace Enter
  Like c'mon. I need those keys to be modifiable. It feels like laziness and is sometimes the result of a console-focused development cycle (with PC as an afterthought). They add all the major keys, but those special characters?
  Nah.
It's also pretty bad when you're not using QWERTY layouts.

Heal-over-time systems in CoD-like shooters lack feedback and are unreliable in terms of measuring difficulty of a task and feeling like you did something special. Everything becomes boringly average.

Hunting around a level for health packs before it wasn't great either.
- I thought Halo CE's system of shields plus health was a neat innovation. Shields regenerate, health does not. Health is basically a buffer for survivability when shields go down, but you can survive combat at low health as long as you're watching your shields.
  The sound cues for shields low/down/regenerating provide a lot more feedback, too.

Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.

Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it's 30% more gold and that's the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.

A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.

Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.

It's different if there's stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it's just jogging? Very disappointing.

when you can rebind movement keys (I'm an esdf player as opposed to wasd), but it does not rebind consistently. So a map is panned using wasd still, or menu browsing is, or even basic movement in a mini-game, or driving using a vehicle etc. It seems developers rarely really test anything but wasd...

Worst was cyberpunk, which always jettisoned me from the car in a super dramatic leap... on every right turn. XD

edit: also, when rebound keys are not represented correctly in tutorials or prompts.. ugh.

I think in cyberpunk its because cars use a separate control set that can/has to be separately rebound. Its so you can use a joystick for driving and a gamepad for walking
- you can configure the keys separately... but it does not work right - F remains hard coded for some features

Alright, I'll limit it to just pet peeves.

Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don't explain enough, others treat you like you've never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it's too much of an info dump, and you're just left wondering wtf they just said. One game that I really liked how they did it was BG3. There's a tutorial, but you can also turn it off on future runs. Worst tutorial I think I've ever seen was Xenoblade 2.

Games (and really any consumable media) that just don't know when to end. There are very few games I've completed, mostly because I get bored. The game overstayed it's welcome and I'm done. The grind isn't worth the final boss fight or whatever is at the end. Generally, it's because games (especially RPGs) think grinding is a "fun" mechanic when it's more of an imbalanced game. Take, for example, Expedition 33, not once in that game do you need to run around grinding levels. You can successfully go through the entire game, only going to each stage once. Fucking fantastic. But then you have games that just went too far with things. Some games, like Skyrim, CP2077, (especially) Hogwarts Legacy, I only know the ending to those games because other people beat them. Ex33 I got 52/55 achievements (just need to win the gestral games and find whatever record I missed). I beat that game entirely in 74 hours. My first run of BG3 (53/54 achievements, only missing the bard one, because I think it's boring), first playthrough was maybe 120 hours (currently over 700 due to multiple playthroughs). Skyrim... 146 hours... 27/75 achievements. CP2077, 133 hours, 18/57 achievements. Hogwarts sits at 50 hours with 19/45 achievements (that game should be a 20-hour game at most).

Games that don't really respect your time. This one, Nintendo does a lot. Actually perfect example is Breath of the Wild. It's a giant fuck off world that's mostly empty, peppered largely with the same enemies throughout the whole thing. You have a weapon mechanic that encourages you NOT to fight (just get some good weapons and head off to exactly where you need to go). The cooking is bullshit, no recipe book, no making a bunch of something, a stupid cutscene every time. And the entire poop joke... like getting 20 for a poop joke would already be too much, but collecting 900 with (IIRC) no fucking way to track them.. Or the fact that the way Nintendo expects you to get arrows is to grind out rupees to buy them. And the exploits used to get arrows or rupees quickly, in a single player game, they actively tried to patch out. That's just one game, Nintendo does this on SO MANY GAMES, which actually pushed me to "fuck Nintendo" and I didn't buy and won't buy a Switch 2.

Some games are combos of these. One game I really like, but I always hit a wall is Satisfactory. Once I get to trains/aluminum, it's just not fun anymore for me. I work 40-80 hours a week (sometimes I work 5x12s and 8ish hours Sat/Sun)(only sometimes, usually closer to 50 hours a week)... so all the extra planning and time to making a factory... like I just don't have the fucking time. Same thing with Dune Awakening. The first zone was the best. Getting your first Orni wasn't too bad, but it was already starting to push it. Having to fucking pay taxes in a game... Oddly, it was about the time I was farming up aluminum, I quit that game too. Maybe I have a pet peeve with aluminum in video games...

Games (and really any consumable media) that just don't know when to end.
Watched a gameranx video the other day about this. It's the lack of closure. Players need that catharsis and pay off for all their efforts or else it inevitably starts to feel pointless rather than fun.
Even MMO's had a closure for their main story arcs and you played the end game content. The new Live Service model though doesn't like that cause it means they can't milk it for eternity. They'd have to keep making new stories and actual game content but that is time consuming and meticulous for creative industries. You can't pump it out like you can cosmetics and battle passes.
It's honestly a huge issue in the industry. The gameranx video goes much deeper into the topic.
Edit: I should have finished reading before I posted this. Now I look dumb for jumping the gun
- Actually, what you said unlocked a memory. Though I don't know if it falls in line with the Gameranx video (I'll have to go watch that) or your sentiment. But the 'Players need that catharsis and pay off for all their efforts or else it inevitably starts to feel pointless rather than fun.' immediately made me think of the first Shadow of Mordor game. It was a great game, undone by a QTE final boss.
  But yeah, so many of these games just don't go anywhere. To your point, the live service games. It's not 100% with what I intended, but I feel it ends up in the same area.... I'm spending all these hours... what am I accomplishing? What's the point of all of this? It's just endless padding with endless travel time, side quests, and anything that requires you to wait real time for the quest to progress. Dailies in WoW, were my WoW killer. Some people saw it as "easy gold"; I saw it as non-content meant to drive daily engagement but not actually accomplish anything in the game. It's all just padding for extra "engagement" or to make a game seem bigger than it is (or should be).
  I'll break down some of the issues I had with the games I listed for better context. And I'll front this with, I know you don't have to do side missions. It's more like, you realise instead of giving you a tight, compact story that's well crafted, they spent too much time padding it out so it appears to be a bigger game. CP2077, the main story is absolutely dwarfed by all the side content. The main quest line is like... ~35 missions? There are like 70+ "gigs" and the same for "side missions". The main story is the thing you do the least. With missing mechanics, I can't help but think it would have been more interesting if it were done in a more linear fashion like Deus Ex Human Revolution. Instead of a giant city that's mostly empty boxes (the buildings aren't buildings) and padded out with side quests. Skyrim, the thing that killed it for me, was just how pathetically easy it was to become the leader of the various groups/factions. It felt so unearned. I can only take being handed "wins" left and right because I'm the fucking chosen one... before it's just dull. It was Medieval Idiocracy. I could have just started learning spells and they're ready to give me the college because I'm the smartest person they've ever seen. Brawndo, it's what Dragonborns crave. And Hogwarts, walking around the castle, was the best part. It felt magical and alive. Some of the puzzles were fun. But the classes were boring tutorial sections, and the main thing you do in the game is LEAVE Hogwarts to go do unspeakable things in non-descript burrows and dungeons scattered all over the place. That game has 15 main quests, 21 side quests. 95 Merlin Trials....
  The tl;dr: An easy way to look at it, CP2077, Hogwarts, and Expedition 33 have similar playtime for just the main quest (per howlongtobeat.com, ~26-28 hours). But how it feels to play the game is drastically different. One had a story to tell and a point to get to, and it does that. The others made a world with a whole bunch of other stuff to do.
Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don't explain enough, others treat you like you've never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it's too much of an info dump, and you're just left wondering wtf they just said.
The ones I hate the most are the ones that meticulously teach you "press A to jump!" (Cool thanks, yeah, I've been playing video games since Super Mario Bros, I'm pretty good on the basics) but then you get out of the tutorial and play for an hour or two and realize that you've never once had to jump, but that complicated combo that they didn't even allude to in the tutorial is for some reason the core game mechanic.

No quick restart options for arcade-style games like shmups
Games that end up being too easy once you unlock of figure out one mechanic or technique like dash-dodge or iframe rolling and now the entire game is just the same loop
Unskippable or long intros or cutscenes (I sold Guilty Gear Strive because of that eagle thing...)
The spam garbage ripoffs on the Nintendo eShop that shouldn't be there
Code in a box
When DLC characters are visible on character select even if you didn't buy them (looking at those 10 greyed-out characters on SF6 are so annoying)

Putting too many game mechanics into a game, like fighting system, bonus crystals, combinations of stuff to upgrade other stuff, plus pets, minigames, repetable quests, party combinations, crosswords, and more, in a single player game especially.

And dark patterns of course.

Yeah, I particularly hate when crafting mechanics get shoehorned into a game, simply because market studies told the publisher that games with crafting sell better. Especially when the crafting system is clearly an afterthought, and the game is entirely unbalanced as a result of it.
For example, the game had crafting added after the inventory system was designed. And crafting doesn’t really become viable until near the end of the game, because it requires a wide variety of materials and you only have access to half of them for the first half of the game. So now you’re drowning in crafting materials that are taking up inventory space/weight for the entire first half of the game.
Another example, devs had an end game build in mind, but decided to lock it behind 35 hours of crafting material grinding. Crafting isn’t really used for anything else in the game, but the end game builds all require a ton of extra grind, with obscure materials hidden behind rare or secret enemy drops. The only purpose is to artificially inflate the playtime, so the publisher can claim the game has “over 100 hours of gameplay” in the ads.
Another example, devs were told to add crafting after the game’s equipment was balanced. In order to encourage players to actually use the crafting system, it is full of super overpowered gear that completely wipes the floor with anything else in the game. Or inversely, the devs didn’t want you to be able to grind materials for gear before you were “supposed” to have it, so all of the crafting gear is subpar at best.
That shit has ruined so many single player games that were otherwise fine.

Challenges that require replaying a level several times to achieve them can be very rewarding

Unless the level also comes with unskippable cut scenes or long conversations on horseback

When a game rereleases with an enhanced version or remake and it ruins the atmosphere. Been playing SMT Strange Journey Redux, and the new artstyle feels so generic and bland compared to the OG Strange Journey. The original had this kind of dark and oppressive atmosphere that Redux is sort of missing. Its really minor, since Redux does add a ton of stuff, so its probably still the better way to play, but that original tone just isnt the same.

I'm souring on difficulty options lately. How am I supposed to know the ideal difficulty of a game without having played it before? You're the developer, you designed it and if you're confident in your game balance you should pick the default difficulty. Better yet, get rid of discrete difficulties and add customizable assist mode instead.

Whilst I didn't enjoy the mechanics of Control, I was very impressed at the settings it offered. I could essentially turn off combat if I wanted. Yes, it won't be the same game experience, but if I choose to play that way - let me!
In the old days we had cheat codes for this stuff. I cheated my way through a lot of games and then revisited later without cheats. Some of those became my favourite games of all time (Theme Hospital and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 both spring to mind).
"ideal" difficulty is whatever you get the most enjoyment out of. Nothing more or less.
- How am I supposed to know which one that is

Currently, I'm replaying The Witcher 3, and the main annoyance I'm having right now is not being able to pause during timed choices (and timed choice are a whole other problem in games too).

You can pause during non-time-sensitive dialog choices, but not during timed ones. I don't know why they specifically deny pausing for those. Maybe to prevent people from pausing and thinking it out? But, some of these times sensitive choices greatly effect the story. I want to be able to think about these choices when they effect the story.

I mean that is kinda exactly what the developers want to provoke with timed dialogue choices. Timed dialogue choices are a game design mechanic to try and get a player to answer on instinct/gut feeling, rather than over analysing and trying to optimise the dialogue.
You not getting to think about it long is very much the intended effect, and allowing a pause would entirely defeat it.
There are of course definite accessibility concerns that should be considered and worked around, such as people with dyslexia who may not be able to properly parse the dialogue options before the timer runs out, but as a game mechanic I think forcing the player to pick on instinct definitely has merit. It helps make the game more immersive, because it puts you under the same pressure to react as your character is in the story right now, and it can lead to more interesting and ultimately enjoyable games by forcing players to potentially make a mistake, and having to find out a way to deal with the fallout.
Timed choices have their place in games as a valid storytelling mechanism but please not in my open-world, RPG, fantasy hack-n-slasher.
Like if I'm playing a role I need to think about my choice and make sure it fits the character I'm trying to play. I'm not playing myself so my knee-jerk choice might not be the same as what I'm trying to experience.

When the music doesn't stop on the Pause screen.

I add non-Steam games to Steam just so I can use Steam Input for controller rebinding

Bad console ports on PC where mouse control code was recycled from gamepad control code. For example, in Just Cause 2, the maximum turn rate is capped and so is the minimum cursor acceleration, with the end result being when you move the mouse your character moves like you've mushed a gamepad control stick instead of the fast, smooth, PC cursor style movement of the reticle that every other PC FPS manages to pull off.

'Puzzles' that are just fetch quests for numbers or pieces of something.

It's so boring and such a waste of my time.

Let me circle these four pillars to find the numbers on them and plug them into the whatever keypad. Wowie. What a head scratcher. I sure feel like I solved a thing, boy howdy.

Yea, if it's a lock code or but you're not gonna make me think or work out what those numbers are, like finding calendars dates or other info from the game world and needing to piece it together, then just make it a damn note to find instead of making me hunt around for each individual number or those lame "match the symbols" shit. Those are so lazy.

Definitely with you on controller rebinding! Now that I'm an old man I also absolutely hate how damn tiny the text is when playing games on a TV. Gamers are getting old, we don't all have young eyes or sit in front of a monitor to play games!

OP, you would love the Steam Deck, or in a few months the Steam Machine. Or any other PC with Steam for that matter. With Steam Input you can rebind the controls of even the most stubborn game.

Unfortunately, I have a PC but can't use it cause of circumstances which don't allow me space to set it up.
I do prefer PC over console for this very reason. PC is just better with customization and accessibility thanks to the option for modding and stuff.
- Well, a Steam Machine might be perfect for your usecase then, it’s small so you can replace your console and enjoy it, as well as Steam Input.

Obligatory tutorials. Make it a choice.

QTE "final bosses". Seemed to be a much bigger problem in the PS3/360 era.

"Open world" or "Sandbox" games that don't care about your progress, where it's painfully obvious that your actions don't matter at all. Yes, this is mostly about Starfield

Games where you can win by a landslide but the computer/story goes "Hah, you were just lucky!"

Live service games that start getting long in the tooth adding too much content.

There's plenty to hate on with Dead by Daylight, but I was at one point pretty good at it both killer and survivor. Eventually I started to feel there were too many perks and characters to keep track of and I lost interest.

I felt the same about Team Fortress 2 when they started adding new weapons. That's probably not a popular opinion but the initial updates tying weapon unlocks to achievements really soured me on the game, permanently. I stopped playing.

Abuse of quick time events. Some overrated games are horrible about it. I think it should never be used.

Photo modes that limit camera movement to within a tiny radius of the player character. FF7 Remake/Rebirth, and FF16, are glaring examples of this.

Or photo modes that fade out NPCs or objects when the camera gets close enough for good screenshots of them.

Just give me a boundless flying camera option and let me live with the unfinished bits if I so choose.

Oooh these are good pet peeves. Photo modes can be hit or miss.
I love the ones in the Spoderman games. Got some amazing screenshots from all 3

Not being able to jump in a first person game.

Then coming across a knee high wall or something you can easily just walk over blocking progression but, nope, can't jump and the game isn't treating it like stairs.
It's such a small thing but can completely take the wind out of your sails when playing.

3D level design where you can get stuck on elements when you just want to move past them. Especially frustrating in racing games or sections where you have to move fast. Controls are just not precise enough to deal with this under stress.

Visible polygons and interactable polygons are not the same thing. Play Banjo Kazooie and Yookah Laylee (including the remake) to see the difference. The latter has you constantly bump into things because the environment is not smoothed out.

On the other hand some studios take it to the other extreme and make you walk almost on rails, childproofing every corner. A good middle ground is needed.

Games with bird sounds. This wouldn't be too bad if i could turn them down or off but because of this I can't play some games or spend time in specific areas of some games because it make my birds go crazy because they think there's another bird in the house.

I wish we could individually turn up or down all of the different elements if sounds not just music/sfx/voice etc

Headphones?
- I have eustachian tube issues that make most headphones very uncomfortable. Not only that I've always seen it weird to do that when I have a TV and a good sound system in my living room to use.

Games that are artificially limited to 60fps

The only games that should be limited are fighting games and that's because it isn't arbitrary for them, it's integral to the frame data for moves.

I have two.

The Culture

I do not claim to be a 'gamer'. I prefer to be best described as someone who plays games, but not nearly as often as one branded a 'gamer' would play games by. But I've been partly turned off from video games because of the culture surrounding them. The streamers who play games, the RGB droolers, the tech-junkies, the whales, the hype-train types, the multi-hour essay level of delivering an opinion on a game .etc

Not to mention, all of the gamer-branded merchandise from chairs to even drinks. It just turns me off and I do not ever associate with that crowd and it's a damn shame there is so much gullibility with the culture that it is difficult to avoid.

Game-Padding

Side-quest after side-quest does a game not make. That kind of thing is what you'd find in an MMO that needs to find things for you to do. Not in a more constrained container of a game that has a fixed story, a fixed completion rate and everything. All it tells me is that the developers did not think of or have had any faith in what they were making.

Gawwdan preventing rebinding is so annoying! Or it's monkey paw wish cousin, letting you rebinding but the on-screen prompts are hard coded to display the default key.

In a simmiliar accessibility vein, I'm hard of hearing so when a game has no option for subtitles then at best I catch 1/3rd of the story.

Wresting control away every time I take ten steps for some stupid exposition. Just leave me the fuck alone. Damn. I want to explore and discover stuff by, you know, playing the game.

This is why Final Fantasy is my favorite game in the series.

Far Cry 5 was the fucking worst with this. Every single thing you did added to a sort of “story progress” bar. And when it filled, you were forcibly dragged away to do a story mission. They literally sleep-darted you from off screen, and had you wake up at the start of the story mission. Like you couldn’t make a more comically overdone “get forced to do story mission” scenario if you tried.
The devs said it was because they wanted to avoid that he Skyrim Syndrome, where players quickly forget about the main story in favor of all of the side content. But the implementation resulted in player agency taking a cudgel to the teeth every few hours.
- Stop doing what you enjoy and pay attention to what I want.

Invisible walls. And I'm not saying the ones that are like way up out of the way that you have to nearly use glitches to get to. I'm talking the "walking down a city street and then you're stopped in the middle of the road for no reason" kind. Like, you put area there that I can see, I want to go there. If you don't want me to go there at least put something there to indicate it's the edge of the map.

Repetitive character dialogue.

It's less of an issue these days, but still incredibly grating when I see it.

Every game has controller remapping with Steam ! But the on-screen hints might get mighty confusing 😅

Too bad PS5 doesn't have steam.
- If only

My particularly niche gripe is bad dialogue tree options. There are so many games where the mechanism is selecting an option and watching it play out, but so many of them are shit when it comes to the difference between what you see as the option and what actually is said/done. Heavy Rain did it. 'What should the character say next? Unreadable zalgotext option A, or unreadable zalgotext option B?' Or ones where the options on screen are 'A) I thoroughly agree. B) I thoroughly disagree. or C) What?' but selecting C means the character isn't just asking for clarification because 'What?' actually points at the voiceline, 'What the fuck are you talking about, you piece of inhuman filth? I bet your a murdering rapist.' If I can't have some idea of what selecting an option will do, I'm not actually playing a game at that point. I might as well be trying to play Mario with a controller that remaps itself randomly.