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...

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".

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.

1. When rebinding the keys, the game wont let me save the changes unless everything has something assigned.

2. 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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• No quit button or hiding it in the settings menus

• No ability to rebind controls

• Endless, unskippable intro videos

• Taking control away to have a cutscene that is all dialogue and no action that could have just as easily been something you control as you walk and listen. Especially if it's not even an in-engine, real-time scripted thing but a pre-rendered video that doesn't even show your actual character as you have them dressed.

• FOMO and most MTX in general.

• No ping/latency stats for everyone on the server

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Only having one master audio slider. Please at least give me one for music, voice, and sound effect mixing separately.

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.

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.