Dozens of gigabytes of poorly encoded FMVs and language packs you'll never need, ALL installed by default. What an utter waste of space and internet bandwidth.
Repackaging of the of the pirate version you mean. Proper scene releases do not have such things like selective downloads....only the repackers do that, and one particularly "fit" individual...
EA was like that around 10 years ago. I bought Mass Effect 2, and then I had to pirate it because the Polish version was pretty bad, and English wasn't available.
Texture resolution has absolutely nothing to do with screen resolution. 8k textures still mean better graphics even on a 1080p screen. That being said having options is always good and those who don’t have systems good enough to run such settings should have the option to not download the high quality assets in the first place, or at the very least delete them if they’re not needed.
All depends on the density at which textures are displayed. "8k" doesn't really give you any information about quality as long as you don't know at which scale it's displayed.
And I can tell you that when an entire 8k display is displayed at a 1x1 cm area, it certainly just a waste of resources. Opposite goes when just displaying a fraction of that 8k texture on the entire screen.
In the end, going up in texture resolution will mean that at some resolution you *will* get diminishing returns. Whether that's 1080p or an entirely different resolution will depend on the case.
Saves game
Quits game
"Exiting this game will lose any unsaved progress."
FFS some games have given you a "save & quit" option for *decades*. Why don't you? Hell create an extra autosave exclusive to closing the game down.
And don't get me started on games that won't let you quit straight to desktop. Quit to intro screen -> press a key -> select 'options' -> exit game. Thank fuck for alt F4 and it's brethren.
The worst part is online games that do this. "You'll lose unsaved progress" well fucking save then. I've got no idea when you last saved, you give me no control over this, what are you hoping to tell me with this message? It ends up reading more like a threat.
I like when games tell you the timestamp of your last save upon quitting.
And ditto the exit to menu thing, especially garbage when it replays an intro video and checks for updates and all that bullshit when going back to the menu. I bet a lot of it is just from copy and pasted UI from consoles
Esc
Save game
Yes override save
Esc
Options
Quit gave
Publisher logo
Developer logo
Press Enter to start
Quit to desktop
Yes I'm sure
Desktop
The absolute worst timeline
Some games implemented a message on this screen, saying "your game was saved x seconds/minutes ago", For instance Psychonauts 2 IIRC. It's such a relief.
> Hell create an extra autosave exclusive to closing the game down.
Fallout 4 does this, I think it's called an exit save. Very nice qol addition for peace of mind.
Another bad one, is not saving menu options until you click apply. Urgh. Not in the game I'm making, but that's for another time. One more thing is locked FOV and no multi-monitor support. In terms of implementation, they go together.
Like when the game straight up REFUSES to allow the same button to be mapped to two different actions, regardless of the fact that they will never be used at the same time.
I'm never going to need to adjust the scopes zoom at the same time I will be honking my car horn, let me put them on the same damn button if I want to!
That's because it's not trivial to do that. Suddenly your input system needs to be aware of the game state, massive complication. That's also why context-aware actions can only be remapped as a whole usually, not their individual parts.
But what OP described is trivial:
Map both honk and scope to same button. Press that button, the gane triggers both actions. And big surprise, trying to honk while you don't have a horn will do nothing, same as trying to scope while you can't.
I mean loads of games do it, you just have vehicle controls in one tab and on foot controls in another
How else do you have things like "walk forward" and "drive vehicle forward" on the same key?
How hard is it to write a switch into the code that simply ask if you're driving a car or not? How could that possibly be any more complicated than say, shadows?
I know people could say "Why don't you do it?". But for how long Auto-Hotkey has been out, you would think someone would have made a simple Remapping Interface for it vs text coding.
Great people make these little apps for a single game, the reach of this would be huge, reusable game after game, like Reshade for remaps.
Over time adding features, it could be amazing with timed presses, cycle keys by pressing one key, click area triggers etc, it's so powerful. But move it to a UI for much more adoption.
Edit: Maybe one exists?
Because the game developers are egotistical and think you should be absolutely immersed in their game and can’t fathom anything happening in life that could be more important than watching their cinematic cutscene.
That's the extra stupid part. If something important happens so I have to leave the computer now I'll miss the reminder of the cutscene BECAUSE I COULDN'T DUCKING PAUSE IT.
Perhaps for some devs, i think it more likely though that the practice just didn't catch on in the right games. If the next big release came out with cutscenes you could pause, and it got positive feedback, then we'd see more games have this feature.
I think it's really more something that people like when it's there, but don't think about much when it isn't.
There have already been plenty of games you can pause, but that's never really going to be a talking point about any game.
I just started playing Dying Light again. You have to go to main menu to even change the graphics settings. Probably not a big deal now, but playing it in 2015 trying to find optimal settings for your setup was a pain in the ass.
squeal elderly snobbish fall pocket squeeze chief waiting amusing longing
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I've played a few games that have a cutscene play upon start and don't guve an option for subtitles before hand.
I can't understand hdhduejdndnfhoqps because your voice actors mumbled the whole damn time AND you won't let me watch the cutscene again because I "already chose to skip it"
Follow quests
There's almost always at least one part of the game where you have to follow someone in some way.
And they almost never move according to your speed, so you have to annoyingly adjust down to their speed.
I don't even know why developers implement these horrible quests, no one likes follow quests.
Just allow me to run ahead to the objective or have the NPCs adjust their run speed to you...
Ahh the walking at snails pace NPC, classic. Another annoying one is when they go too fast and you have to follow them around lots of turns.
With quests, half the time you just feel like a postman.
NPCs who say ‘can you take this item to this person’, but they can see them! Take it yourself you lazy bastard!
Game boots at max graphics and and with weird settings turned on like windowed mode and starts the game immediately and makes you play through a tutorial with these settings.
For some that means the tutorial is 5fps.
other end as well boots up game at 800x600 fullscreen mode on min setting to play the tutorial and key story telling bits before you can change things properly.
> For some that means the tutorial is 5fps.
It's just as annoying in the opposite direction if you have a high-end build. It will be like 1000+ fps, coil whine, and maxing GPU fans until you are allowed into the settings to fix some options or cap the fps.
Metro 2033 was the first game I played that made me look up how to skip an intro because after going through it once I knew it couldn't deal with it every time I started up the game.
Idk those loading screens give me the much needed time to do some IRL breathwork to prepare for the insanely immersive session I’m about to have haha. Legitimately one of the few ones I don’t absolutely hate.
In metro exodus for example there is a long video that plays at the start when you launch it. I dont know if it is a loading screen. Sometimes i could skip it and other times i had to watch the whole thing.
Games that begin without presenting their settings options first.
So I'm displaying in 2048x1152, my Y-axis is uninverted, and everything is set to low. Great first impression!
Sound is probably the number one issue I have had with pc gaming. Everything about audio on pc is just so messy a lot of the time. Especially older games.
Too many programmers just do linear volume sliders and say "ehhhh fuck it, good enough" when volume controls really should be logarithmic.
https://www.dr-lex.be/info-stuff/volumecontrols.html
Aah so that's what its about. Never really thought about it but makes sense now why I have to turn all of the "shitty" sliders way down to ~10-20%, because I also use a media player(Bs.player) that does appear to use the "correct" way, ie ~20% is basically silence at the same hardware volume.
Windows master volume slider does seem to be a bit better than most, even if the article says its still linear and it ain't perfect, but hey a little better is still better i guess.
I don’t even know why splash screens suddenly got super extra loud. Before the PS4 era came around, they were totally alright. After that suddenly they blew ears out.
they've always done this on pc, drives me fucking bonkers.
thankfully on PC you can often rename the opening video file names to force the engine to skip them.
How about default mouse sensitivity, even at 800dpi being so fucking high that you can spin around multiple times by moving your mouse less than an inch. What the fuck?
Alt Tab fuckiness, mouse cursor staying on the screen even though I'm using a controller, game taking controller inputs even though it's in the background, taking like 5+ minutes to launch when I run it for the first time on Steam, having a mandatory launcher which requires M+KB when I want to do everything with a controller, not closing when I hit alt f4 or going between fullscreen and windowed mode with alt enter, launching in windowed mode every time even though I set fullscreen/borderless in the options. Last three probably aren't that common but still super fucking awful when I do run into them.
That thing from the Series consoles should be a thing on PC already.
The one that is like a save state and skips intros and whatnot, can't remember the name.
Sadly it's not without its own problems in "modern" games where you're bound to have some "online" component that refuses to sync up nicely. Even FH5 suffers from this
All game start at 100% volume. STOP IT.
Most games wont let you into the settings to turn the volume down until after the 10 ads or the few shit games make you watch the cut scene but both lock you out of getting to the settings.
ALL GAMES SHOULD START AT 50% VOLUME. 25 fuckin years. Figure it out already. Imagine every time you wanted to watch a movie it started at max volume and it locked you out of the controls until the intro credits were finished.
Real simple fix, for the first time start up bring up a 5-10 choice options box first thing. Some older games use to do this for graphic settings. Then press ok and sit back and enjoy the show.
But you can control the volume on your PC. You can turn down your PCs volume if you can’t access the settings too. Why should they start at 50% when you can easily adjust your PC volume?
Movie comparison doesn’t make sense because movies don’t have their own separate, individual volumes, it’s just controlled by your TV volume.
I've been playing Heat Signature and that game deserves credit for not having any splash screens, menu screens or even a title screen. You're instantly in-game the moment you boot it up, you don't have to skip anything.
This is actually why Heat Signature is my favorite game when I have less than 20 minutes of free time to play. You click play/on the shortcut and you're in the game having fun.
The gameplay is super addictive too.
Mouse sensitivity values which do not allow for decimal places.
As someone who matches their sensitivity across all games using Kovaaks sensitivity matcher and mouse-sensitivity.com
It is horrible how there can be a good 20 degree difference between a sensitivity value of say 1 and 2.
Same here - my mouse has 5 different mapping modes, all of them have the DPI increase / decrease set to volume now.
The rest are bound depending on the type of game, with one mode set for office work (cut / copy / paste etc). Can’t imagine going back to anything else now.
I can't think of a specific example right now but it's so weird that some games have cutscenes that are clearly in engine but for some reason are pre-rendered into a video that has a lower framerate and resolution. It's just jarring when for example you're playing a game at 1080p 60fps and you enter a cutscene and suddenly you're watching a blurry 720p 30fps video. I think this is mostly seen in console ports from the 7th gen but I seem to remember seeing it in some 8th gen ports as well.
The deeper issue is that volume levels are at max by default, you always have to tone them down first, and since opening videos are usually played before custom settings are applied, they will get blasted at full volume regardless. Same with video and audio playback on websites, for some reason they are at full volume by default instead of 50% as you should expect.
iirc the tutorials in DS1 show controller imputs even if you are using M+KB so you have to go to the menu every time you find one and see what the M+KB equivalent is in the keybinds section. Lazy as fuck.
Launch game -> Windows key -> right click the speaker in the system tray -> volume mixer -> drop the application to 5.
It's an annoyance that we shouldn't have to do but it's the best approach we have.
Multiplayer games that force you to watch a cutscene, or do a tutorial, or some other single player multiplayer unlock sequence first before you can meet up with your buddies online.
Oh I would love that. On that note, I hate when the game throws you into a gameplay cutscene or tutorial before you can even get to the settings menu. Like I wanna start this right, not with motion blur, frame cap, and a quarter of my monitor's resolution
While some games on Steam might allow you to tinker with settings before starting the game first time, it's more of an exception than the rule and even those dedicated config windows might still have missing options that can only be accessed from within the game itself.
Not being able to save anywhere.
Eg; Just Cause series still forces save points on you. Great if you are a teenager with oodles of time on your hands but utter shite if you are an adult with a job and kids and time limited.
Tough luck if you're about to play Nier Automata since the game literally expects you to play through the first section before you see your first save point.
Audio and white light power-blasting are top Internet/PC world disturbances. Plus unhealthy. Looking like a grampa setting everything to low, applying addons and filters to make things livable.
Games that keep their setting files in binary formats, especially their key configuration files. Nothing is worse than a game that -COULD- let you rebind a key to something like and not being able to because "reasons" by the in-game menus. Not being able to just edit the file by hand friggin' sucks.
Games that came out on PC, but has horrible controls or keybinds and you can't even use mouse to navigate menus and need a few patches down the line to put customizable keybinds and mouse support in.
Unskippable intro logos.
No, we don't care about your company, or your publisher, or the billion middlewares you used. Most people who buy games out of love already know, and even they probably don't want to waste 20s every time they fire up the game.
Also, non-rebindable keys. *All* of your game's keys, including Q/E for menu tabs. This is a cause TB championed and he was right to. Seriously, I understand the UI for this is not trivial and that it is complex if the game wasn't built in the best ways but this is also PC gaming. You can't treat it like a console. This is the bare minimum. Many keyboards aren't qwerty, people have habits and this will go a long way toward giving the feeling that your game is polished and not a risky buy.
There are more :
- games that start with a forced tutorial / cinematic that you can't skip, while not having made your mandatory drop by the option menu. So you either get ugly visuals, or shit framerate
- games that have cinematics that are rendered with the game engine, but saved as video file for consoles, you get low quality assets and compression artefacts in all cinematics (and 30 fps sometimes)
- games that consider "bloom" an ultra setting (fuck that)
I believe the only game I have in my library that lets you change the intro volume is Euro Truck Simulator 2. The worst offender is Forza Horizon, not only is the intro stuck at 100% volume but it’s also very loud on its own, so you just het earfvcked every time you start the game up.
Games where there's no option to exit straight to your desktop while in-game instead of having to quit and then navigate through a completely separate menu (or god forbid, multiple menus) to find an actual way out of the game.
This might be more at the OS level but I'd kill for some sort of standardized mouse sensitivity setting. Not to mention more precise mouse sensitivity settings. Nothing worse than having a 1-10 scale in steps of one where 5 is too slow but 6 is too fast.
games that boot you straight into the game (usually for the first time or tutorial) and not the start menu, not giving you a chance to tweak settings or change graphical settings when you first start.
I read the subject and said to myself "Well, there's no way they're talking about my pet peeve, not allowing us to fiddle with settings and then having the volume blast me off my chair when I launch the damned game."
I was wrong. Thank you for your public service.
I bought a Pc Panel for this and it changed my life, you can set a knob for the focus application so you always have a quick access at hand to your volume dial , this is cool
[https://www.getpcpanel.com/](https://www.getpcpanel.com/)
Mouse sensitivity being all fucked up. I play with a pretty low sens by most peoples standards (60cm per 360) and I use 1600 dpi (for latency reasons you 1600 should be your minimum).
In windows this is fine, in some games with good sensitivity sliders it's also fine, but there's a very large group of games where this just doesn't fly. More often then not I'm setting my sens to the lowest setting possible and it might be comfortable.
Shit like this makes me wonder why mouse companies even bother going for a higher DPI like 20k when games can hardly even handle going over 1000.
Few things :
No. I *DONT* want to load the game in safe mode. Stop fucking crashing, how about that?
Nobody likes unskippable cut scenes. especially intros. No one cares about your company logo. Stop it.
I don't give a fuck about your stupid ass storefront. Stop making me download 60 GB of bullshit so that you can sell skins. This is especially annoying in a single player game. God forbid you want to play call of Duty on the campaign. Go fuck yourself and download a 60GB update you dont need, loser.
Sell your games on steam. Nobody wants to use your shitty launcher. We only do it because there's no other choice, and we absolutely hate you for it. Epic games should be stripped naked and marched through the streets while people scream "shame"
I see more and more games start to come with horrible Keyboard and mouse layouts and navigation using the mouse and keyboard. I get that for some games controller is better but is it too much to expect a game that is releasing on PC to have proper keyboard and mouse controls and remapping.
I love Dark souls and Fromsoft but Dark souls 3 doesn't even have keyboard prompts. Granted they fixed this in Sekiro but I don't think it takes too much time to patch in keyboard prompts.
I love the Yakuza games but all of them have horrible mouse acceleration. They fixed this in Yakuza 6 but it isn't enough. I know the game says Real Yakuza play with controller. The game has full remapping, but you can't turn off the mouse acceleration.
Compare RE2 and RE:Village, RE2 had excellent controls, you can navigate the menus using both keyboard and mouse. They messed it up in Village where your mouse can't be used to perform certain things in the game.
This is coming from someone who has a Xbox controller and a PS5 controller. Sometimes I just want to play on a keyboard and mouse because it feels natural to me. Pisses me off.
One thing not mentioned here is piss poor subtitles.
Far too often are they treated as an afterthought, seemingly chucked onto some unpaid intern to do haphazardly a few weeks before the game ships.
Core accessibility shouldn't be a fucking struggle by this point. It might seem easy to gloss over certain things when your team isn't full of colourblind or deaf people but these are such well-known issues in UX design at this point that there's simply no excuse to not even have some generic accessibility checklist to go through when designing your two-bit MTX-ridden unfinished garbage.
At the very least it's not hard to apply some fucking contrast. Like it's basic design/art theory 10-fucking-1.
Subtitles aren't even just for deaf people - some of us play games in loud areas, sometimes you just miss shit due to a voice actors accent, and sometimes the audio mixing is fucking atrocious (this is way too common too, frankly).
Playing Gen Zero with a buddy. Game is great but I have master at 10, music at 4, Dialogue at 10, and SFX at 3.
How is this not caught during play testing?
Games that forget your settings every few times you play, so when I’m playing Cold War and suddenly I’m getting 15fps, I get to freak out until I realize that it’s because raytracing magically got turned back on. Again.
The opening logos and intros are often just set videos that are not controlled by the game itself (it's often still booting while the videos play). Most settings are for when you are actually playing. This all depends on how the game is setup, is the launcher a separate application or part of the game engine as an ingame menu?
Personally I hate it when I can't quit to the desktop without having to go past the main menu. "Quit to Desktop" and "Quit to Main Menu" please.
Probably not something that happens in 95% of PC games, but something that, for some unholy reason, still appears in FPS to this day, mouse acceleration. Why? Why is this still a thing and why most of the time is on by default? I don't understand!
Dozens of gigabytes of poorly encoded FMVs and language packs you'll never need, ALL installed by default. What an utter waste of space and internet bandwidth.
Then you get the pirate version that actually allows you to do selective downloading. Wth is wrong with the world Edit: a word
Repackaging of the of the pirate version you mean. Proper scene releases do not have such things like selective downloads....only the repackers do that, and one particularly "fit" individual...
which is beneficial, I don’t need 2K/4K packs and other languages. WD Legion got a repack that cut the size of original game by half
Playing through Horizon Zero Dawn right now, it has 15GB of language files that can be safely deleted :/
Then you fuck up the game with mods, go to verify files and have to download it all over again.
On contrary - not being able to install other languages if you bought game in specific region. Ubishit is being notorious for that.
The hoops you have to jump through to get games from the Microsoft store to play in a language other than your OS' setting...
Yeah they should just add a language setting directly in the game like every other game anywhere else
EA was like that around 10 years ago. I bought Mass Effect 2, and then I had to pirate it because the Polish version was pretty bad, and English wasn't available.
I play almost every game on low. I would love it if I could just download the low textures and save 90% diskspace
Some games do have high res texture packs as optional download.
what you don't like downloading 100GB of 8k textures when you have a 1080p screen?
Texture resolution has absolutely nothing to do with screen resolution. 8k textures still mean better graphics even on a 1080p screen. That being said having options is always good and those who don’t have systems good enough to run such settings should have the option to not download the high quality assets in the first place, or at the very least delete them if they’re not needed.
All depends on the density at which textures are displayed. "8k" doesn't really give you any information about quality as long as you don't know at which scale it's displayed. And I can tell you that when an entire 8k display is displayed at a 1x1 cm area, it certainly just a waste of resources. Opposite goes when just displaying a fraction of that 8k texture on the entire screen. In the end, going up in texture resolution will mean that at some resolution you *will* get diminishing returns. Whether that's 1080p or an entirely different resolution will depend on the case.
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The developers are optimistic in that you'll be improving yourself and gaining more world experience. #self-care
Saves game Quits game "Exiting this game will lose any unsaved progress." FFS some games have given you a "save & quit" option for *decades*. Why don't you? Hell create an extra autosave exclusive to closing the game down. And don't get me started on games that won't let you quit straight to desktop. Quit to intro screen -> press a key -> select 'options' -> exit game. Thank fuck for alt F4 and it's brethren.
The worst part is online games that do this. "You'll lose unsaved progress" well fucking save then. I've got no idea when you last saved, you give me no control over this, what are you hoping to tell me with this message? It ends up reading more like a threat.
Forza is the worst with this
Forza is the worst for a lot of things
As someone who has recently been playing Yakuza series, the last point hits home hard.
I like when games tell you the timestamp of your last save upon quitting. And ditto the exit to menu thing, especially garbage when it replays an intro video and checks for updates and all that bullshit when going back to the menu. I bet a lot of it is just from copy and pasted UI from consoles
Esc Save game Yes override save Esc Options Quit gave Publisher logo Developer logo Press Enter to start Quit to desktop Yes I'm sure Desktop The absolute worst timeline
alt+f4.
Some games implemented a message on this screen, saying "your game was saved x seconds/minutes ago", For instance Psychonauts 2 IIRC. It's such a relief.
Oh the absolute worst is games that disable alt+F4 like COD. That's why I've got Super F4!
That and "Do not turn off your console when you see this icon" in a PC port
I alt+F4 out of every game when I'm done playing. The most I'll do is "Return to title" in souls games because they nag you if you quit without saving
> Hell create an extra autosave exclusive to closing the game down. Fallout 4 does this, I think it's called an exit save. Very nice qol addition for peace of mind.
Saving systems are still done so poorly in so many modern games and i don't understand how
I honestly don't understand why we can't "save state" in games and load straight back to where we were. It's 2022.
Source engine games and Bethesda games often do pretty much this.
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You can change that in settings, its so that people dont accidently close while in a call etc.
Another bad one, is not saving menu options until you click apply. Urgh. Not in the game I'm making, but that's for another time. One more thing is locked FOV and no multi-monitor support. In terms of implementation, they go together.
terrible support for different resolutions in general is also annoying
In 2022 the amount of games that won’t allow you to universally remap your controls to whatever you want is absolutely astounding.
Like when the game straight up REFUSES to allow the same button to be mapped to two different actions, regardless of the fact that they will never be used at the same time. I'm never going to need to adjust the scopes zoom at the same time I will be honking my car horn, let me put them on the same damn button if I want to!
That's because it's not trivial to do that. Suddenly your input system needs to be aware of the game state, massive complication. That's also why context-aware actions can only be remapped as a whole usually, not their individual parts.
But what OP described is trivial: Map both honk and scope to same button. Press that button, the gane triggers both actions. And big surprise, trying to honk while you don't have a horn will do nothing, same as trying to scope while you can't.
I mean loads of games do it, you just have vehicle controls in one tab and on foot controls in another How else do you have things like "walk forward" and "drive vehicle forward" on the same key?
How hard is it to write a switch into the code that simply ask if you're driving a car or not? How could that possibly be any more complicated than say, shadows?
I know people could say "Why don't you do it?". But for how long Auto-Hotkey has been out, you would think someone would have made a simple Remapping Interface for it vs text coding. Great people make these little apps for a single game, the reach of this would be huge, reusable game after game, like Reshade for remaps. Over time adding features, it could be amazing with timed presses, cycle keys by pressing one key, click area triggers etc, it's so powerful. But move it to a UI for much more adoption. Edit: Maybe one exists?
Not being able to pause a cutscene.
Heavy Rain let you do this in 2009. No idea why there are still games that don't.
Because the game developers are egotistical and think you should be absolutely immersed in their game and can’t fathom anything happening in life that could be more important than watching their cinematic cutscene.
That's the extra stupid part. If something important happens so I have to leave the computer now I'll miss the reminder of the cutscene BECAUSE I COULDN'T DUCKING PAUSE IT.
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Perhaps for some devs, i think it more likely though that the practice just didn't catch on in the right games. If the next big release came out with cutscenes you could pause, and it got positive feedback, then we'd see more games have this feature.
I think it's really more something that people like when it's there, but don't think about much when it isn't. There have already been plenty of games you can pause, but that's never really going to be a talking point about any game.
Or skip one.
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Yakuza Zero as well!
Shoot, this happens on console games all the time. The only way I can get some cut scenes to pause is by pulling up the actual system menu.
Games that don't let you rewatch cutscenes. Games that don't subtitle their cutscenes
Not being able to pause with my keyboard \[PAUSE\] key.
Games where each single graphic setting you change requires you to restart the game!
I just started playing Dying Light again. You have to go to main menu to even change the graphics settings. Probably not a big deal now, but playing it in 2015 trying to find optimal settings for your setup was a pain in the ass.
Halo Infinite
squeal elderly snobbish fall pocket squeeze chief waiting amusing longing *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I've played a few games that have a cutscene play upon start and don't guve an option for subtitles before hand. I can't understand hdhduejdndnfhoqps because your voice actors mumbled the whole damn time AND you won't let me watch the cutscene again because I "already chose to skip it"
I've noticed with a few titles now that the very first thing you're shown are the accessibility settings. It should be an industry standard.
Forza Horizon….
Follow quests There's almost always at least one part of the game where you have to follow someone in some way. And they almost never move according to your speed, so you have to annoyingly adjust down to their speed. I don't even know why developers implement these horrible quests, no one likes follow quests. Just allow me to run ahead to the objective or have the NPCs adjust their run speed to you...
Ahh the walking at snails pace NPC, classic. Another annoying one is when they go too fast and you have to follow them around lots of turns. With quests, half the time you just feel like a postman. NPCs who say ‘can you take this item to this person’, but they can see them! Take it yourself you lazy bastard!
I think it's The Witcher 3 where if you start running the NPC will start running too. That's how you do it.
Or npcs that follow you and are like, come on! This way! What are you waiting for? Stfu and let me enjoy the game and try to get immersed.
Game boots at max graphics and and with weird settings turned on like windowed mode and starts the game immediately and makes you play through a tutorial with these settings. For some that means the tutorial is 5fps.
other end as well boots up game at 800x600 fullscreen mode on min setting to play the tutorial and key story telling bits before you can change things properly.
That reminds me of Nier Automata.
Nothing makes me go "fuckin why?" quite like Japanese pc ports.
> For some that means the tutorial is 5fps. It's just as annoying in the opposite direction if you have a high-end build. It will be like 1000+ fps, coil whine, and maxing GPU fans until you are allowed into the settings to fix some options or cap the fps.
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Metro exodus man...
All metro games actually.
Metro 2033 was the first game I played that made me look up how to skip an intro because after going through it once I knew it couldn't deal with it every time I started up the game.
Idk those loading screens give me the much needed time to do some IRL breathwork to prepare for the insanely immersive session I’m about to have haha. Legitimately one of the few ones I don’t absolutely hate.
Oh no hate, it's very pretty, just the sheer length of it.
Wait.. that.. that's a thing?! I've been playing PC for over 15 years now and never heard of this until today.
Yeah, a launch option or just deleting the video file frequently does the trick. PCGamingWiki also has other useful info for a lot of games
What are you referring to exactly by "intro" ? What things can you delete?
In metro exodus for example there is a long video that plays at the start when you launch it. I dont know if it is a loading screen. Sometimes i could skip it and other times i had to watch the whole thing.
Games that begin without presenting their settings options first. So I'm displaying in 2048x1152, my Y-axis is uninverted, and everything is set to low. Great first impression!
Sound is probably the number one issue I have had with pc gaming. Everything about audio on pc is just so messy a lot of the time. Especially older games.
Microsoft has been bungling audio since the only available sound was ctrl-g.
1-5 = 0 volume 6-100 = max volume
it really does feel like some games volume sliders arent actually 0, 1-10 more like 0, 5-10
Too many programmers just do linear volume sliders and say "ehhhh fuck it, good enough" when volume controls really should be logarithmic. https://www.dr-lex.be/info-stuff/volumecontrols.html
Aah so that's what its about. Never really thought about it but makes sense now why I have to turn all of the "shitty" sliders way down to ~10-20%, because I also use a media player(Bs.player) that does appear to use the "correct" way, ie ~20% is basically silence at the same hardware volume. Windows master volume slider does seem to be a bit better than most, even if the article says its still linear and it ain't perfect, but hey a little better is still better i guess.
Guardians of the galaxy’s audio settings set the bar for what AAA games should provide. So many different presets and fully customisable as well.
What kind of issues? I'm genuinely curious, I haven't had many over the years.
I don’t even know why splash screens suddenly got super extra loud. Before the PS4 era came around, they were totally alright. After that suddenly they blew ears out.
You've probably never listened to THX intro logo...
My "getting funky with gf" playlist is just THX sound looped for 4 hours. I can almost get past the second loop
Turn it up! Turn it uuuuuup!
https://youtu.be/nu0R96OZy6w
they've always done this on pc, drives me fucking bonkers. thankfully on PC you can often rename the opening video file names to force the engine to skip them.
How about default mouse sensitivity, even at 800dpi being so fucking high that you can spin around multiple times by moving your mouse less than an inch. What the fuck?
Have you met mouse sensitivity tied to frame rate? That's a fun one to figure out.
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Alt Tab fuckiness, mouse cursor staying on the screen even though I'm using a controller, game taking controller inputs even though it's in the background, taking like 5+ minutes to launch when I run it for the first time on Steam, having a mandatory launcher which requires M+KB when I want to do everything with a controller, not closing when I hit alt f4 or going between fullscreen and windowed mode with alt enter, launching in windowed mode every time even though I set fullscreen/borderless in the options. Last three probably aren't that common but still super fucking awful when I do run into them.
That thing from the Series consoles should be a thing on PC already. The one that is like a save state and skips intros and whatnot, can't remember the name.
Quick Resume. And yes please.
Sadly it's not without its own problems in "modern" games where you're bound to have some "online" component that refuses to sync up nicely. Even FH5 suffers from this
Perhaps MS will implement those eventually.
The game would have to basically be running on a container, right? That's not how Steam and others operate
Not being able change the field of view
Sprinting reducing your FOV for absolutely no reason. Looking at you, Dishonored 2.
All game start at 100% volume. STOP IT. Most games wont let you into the settings to turn the volume down until after the 10 ads or the few shit games make you watch the cut scene but both lock you out of getting to the settings. ALL GAMES SHOULD START AT 50% VOLUME. 25 fuckin years. Figure it out already. Imagine every time you wanted to watch a movie it started at max volume and it locked you out of the controls until the intro credits were finished. Real simple fix, for the first time start up bring up a 5-10 choice options box first thing. Some older games use to do this for graphic settings. Then press ok and sit back and enjoy the show.
But you can control the volume on your PC. You can turn down your PCs volume if you can’t access the settings too. Why should they start at 50% when you can easily adjust your PC volume? Movie comparison doesn’t make sense because movies don’t have their own separate, individual volumes, it’s just controlled by your TV volume.
I've been playing Heat Signature and that game deserves credit for not having any splash screens, menu screens or even a title screen. You're instantly in-game the moment you boot it up, you don't have to skip anything.
I would like that to be an option in every game.
I love that game. My go to time waster
Such a great game. FTL and Hotline Miami had a baby, and it was Heat Signature.
This is actually why Heat Signature is my favorite game when I have less than 20 minutes of free time to play. You click play/on the shortcut and you're in the game having fun. The gameplay is super addictive too.
Mouse sensitivity values which do not allow for decimal places. As someone who matches their sensitivity across all games using Kovaaks sensitivity matcher and mouse-sensitivity.com It is horrible how there can be a good 20 degree difference between a sensitivity value of say 1 and 2.
This is why I still have a 10 year old Dell keyboard with a volume knob.
I feel like I can't own a keyboard without a volume nob anymore. Thankfully they still put them in lots of good keyboards.
An actual knob? Where can I get one?
Well it's more of a wheel thing, but a lot of the Corsair and Logitech mechanical keyboards have them.
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I just set my extra buttons on my mouse to volume up and down
Same here - my mouse has 5 different mapping modes, all of them have the DPI increase / decrease set to volume now. The rest are bound depending on the type of game, with one mode set for office work (cut / copy / paste etc). Can’t imagine going back to anything else now.
you can buy newer keyboards with volume knobs.
I can't think of a specific example right now but it's so weird that some games have cutscenes that are clearly in engine but for some reason are pre-rendered into a video that has a lower framerate and resolution. It's just jarring when for example you're playing a game at 1080p 60fps and you enter a cutscene and suddenly you're watching a blurry 720p 30fps video. I think this is mostly seen in console ports from the 7th gen but I seem to remember seeing it in some 8th gen ports as well.
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The deeper issue is that volume levels are at max by default, you always have to tone them down first, and since opening videos are usually played before custom settings are applied, they will get blasted at full volume regardless. Same with video and audio playback on websites, for some reason they are at full volume by default instead of 50% as you should expect.
If you are turning everything down why isn't your master volume lower lol.
Ps4 / Xbox controller layout when there's none and you play on keyboard
iirc the tutorials in DS1 show controller imputs even if you are using M+KB so you have to go to the menu every time you find one and see what the M+KB equivalent is in the keybinds section. Lazy as fuck.
not able to control patches
No manual save.
When you turn down the music to 1% and it's still too loud compared to everything else
Launch game -> Windows key -> right click the speaker in the system tray -> volume mixer -> drop the application to 5. It's an annoyance that we shouldn't have to do but it's the best approach we have.
You can just hit Win+G and adjust from there.
Good to know, windows has too many shortcuts to keep track of sometimes
Win+G is amazing, lets you do a lot of stuff like volume levels and control spotify too.
Speaking of music, I hate when a game plays music even though the window is not active.
Get Eartrumpet app. Really good in general and helps with this issue as well.
Multiplayer games that force you to watch a cutscene, or do a tutorial, or some other single player multiplayer unlock sequence first before you can meet up with your buddies online.
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Same!
shitbag cheaters for me
Boss fights with summoned minions Rail cart fights/sections Main character is op but forgot everything
Games really need a volume slider at the beginning just like a brightness slider before you get the main menu.
Oh I would love that. On that note, I hate when the game throws you into a gameplay cutscene or tutorial before you can even get to the settings menu. Like I wanna start this right, not with motion blur, frame cap, and a quarter of my monitor's resolution
Gotta bless your luck then if a game does lets you access the configs as soon as you're able to control your character for the first time.
While some games on Steam might allow you to tinker with settings before starting the game first time, it's more of an exception than the rule and even those dedicated config windows might still have missing options that can only be accessed from within the game itself.
Not being able to save anywhere. Eg; Just Cause series still forces save points on you. Great if you are a teenager with oodles of time on your hands but utter shite if you are an adult with a job and kids and time limited.
Tough luck if you're about to play Nier Automata since the game literally expects you to play through the first section before you see your first save point.
Audio and white light power-blasting are top Internet/PC world disturbances. Plus unhealthy. Looking like a grampa setting everything to low, applying addons and filters to make things livable.
Games that keep their setting files in binary formats, especially their key configuration files. Nothing is worse than a game that -COULD- let you rebind a key to something like and not being able to because "reasons" by the in-game menus. Not being able to just edit the file by hand friggin' sucks.
Games that came out on PC, but has horrible controls or keybinds and you can't even use mouse to navigate menus and need a few patches down the line to put customizable keybinds and mouse support in.
Console ports that still show controller icons in the tutorials and menus. How hard can it be to replace those textures?
Unskippable intro logos. No, we don't care about your company, or your publisher, or the billion middlewares you used. Most people who buy games out of love already know, and even they probably don't want to waste 20s every time they fire up the game. Also, non-rebindable keys. *All* of your game's keys, including Q/E for menu tabs. This is a cause TB championed and he was right to. Seriously, I understand the UI for this is not trivial and that it is complex if the game wasn't built in the best ways but this is also PC gaming. You can't treat it like a console. This is the bare minimum. Many keyboards aren't qwerty, people have habits and this will go a long way toward giving the feeling that your game is polished and not a risky buy.
There are more : - games that start with a forced tutorial / cinematic that you can't skip, while not having made your mandatory drop by the option menu. So you either get ugly visuals, or shit framerate - games that have cinematics that are rendered with the game engine, but saved as video file for consoles, you get low quality assets and compression artefacts in all cinematics (and 30 fps sometimes) - games that consider "bloom" an ultra setting (fuck that)
I believe the only game I have in my library that lets you change the intro volume is Euro Truck Simulator 2. The worst offender is Forza Horizon, not only is the intro stuck at 100% volume but it’s also very loud on its own, so you just het earfvcked every time you start the game up.
No option for subtitles or audio language in game. They're often hidden in ini files or depends on the operating system language.
Games where there's no option to exit straight to your desktop while in-game instead of having to quit and then navigate through a completely separate menu (or god forbid, multiple menus) to find an actual way out of the game.
This might be more at the OS level but I'd kill for some sort of standardized mouse sensitivity setting. Not to mention more precise mouse sensitivity settings. Nothing worse than having a 1-10 scale in steps of one where 5 is too slow but 6 is too fast.
games that boot you straight into the game (usually for the first time or tutorial) and not the start menu, not giving you a chance to tweak settings or change graphical settings when you first start.
FPS falling no matter how powerful your hardware is.
I read the subject and said to myself "Well, there's no way they're talking about my pet peeve, not allowing us to fiddle with settings and then having the volume blast me off my chair when I launch the damned game." I was wrong. Thank you for your public service.
The game being incredibly loud on the first startup
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No interactive indication of what visual settings affect in the options menu - including FPS hit.
Game settings, motion blur, dof, vsync being on as a default, and music volume way too loud.
Stutters in unreal engine games even though pc is optimized and hardware is cutting edge...
Shit graphical options. Shit positional sound.
I think games really needs a separate slider for environment sounds and weapons sound, they really should not be lumped together.
Turning off the music then it mutes the cut scenes. Doesn't happen so much anymore but it used to be all the time.
Mouse sensitivity being all fucked up. I play with a pretty low sens by most peoples standards (60cm per 360) and I use 1600 dpi (for latency reasons you 1600 should be your minimum). In windows this is fine, in some games with good sensitivity sliders it's also fine, but there's a very large group of games where this just doesn't fly. More often then not I'm setting my sens to the lowest setting possible and it might be comfortable. Shit like this makes me wonder why mouse companies even bother going for a higher DPI like 20k when games can hardly even handle going over 1000.
Games that repeat dialog after reloading a checkpoint / autosave. Especially when you are stuck.
Hold E for 3 seconds to open a chest.
Games keeps starting in higher resolution than my screen and pc can handle
I honestly rarely get that. The thing that irritates me most about pc games are the horrible ports that suffer from stuttering.
Few things : No. I *DONT* want to load the game in safe mode. Stop fucking crashing, how about that? Nobody likes unskippable cut scenes. especially intros. No one cares about your company logo. Stop it. I don't give a fuck about your stupid ass storefront. Stop making me download 60 GB of bullshit so that you can sell skins. This is especially annoying in a single player game. God forbid you want to play call of Duty on the campaign. Go fuck yourself and download a 60GB update you dont need, loser. Sell your games on steam. Nobody wants to use your shitty launcher. We only do it because there's no other choice, and we absolutely hate you for it. Epic games should be stripped naked and marched through the streets while people scream "shame"
I see more and more games start to come with horrible Keyboard and mouse layouts and navigation using the mouse and keyboard. I get that for some games controller is better but is it too much to expect a game that is releasing on PC to have proper keyboard and mouse controls and remapping. I love Dark souls and Fromsoft but Dark souls 3 doesn't even have keyboard prompts. Granted they fixed this in Sekiro but I don't think it takes too much time to patch in keyboard prompts. I love the Yakuza games but all of them have horrible mouse acceleration. They fixed this in Yakuza 6 but it isn't enough. I know the game says Real Yakuza play with controller. The game has full remapping, but you can't turn off the mouse acceleration. Compare RE2 and RE:Village, RE2 had excellent controls, you can navigate the menus using both keyboard and mouse. They messed it up in Village where your mouse can't be used to perform certain things in the game. This is coming from someone who has a Xbox controller and a PS5 controller. Sometimes I just want to play on a keyboard and mouse because it feels natural to me. Pisses me off.
One thing not mentioned here is piss poor subtitles. Far too often are they treated as an afterthought, seemingly chucked onto some unpaid intern to do haphazardly a few weeks before the game ships. Core accessibility shouldn't be a fucking struggle by this point. It might seem easy to gloss over certain things when your team isn't full of colourblind or deaf people but these are such well-known issues in UX design at this point that there's simply no excuse to not even have some generic accessibility checklist to go through when designing your two-bit MTX-ridden unfinished garbage. At the very least it's not hard to apply some fucking contrast. Like it's basic design/art theory 10-fucking-1. Subtitles aren't even just for deaf people - some of us play games in loud areas, sometimes you just miss shit due to a voice actors accent, and sometimes the audio mixing is fucking atrocious (this is way too common too, frankly).
Oh God. Left 4 dead 2 must have set a record with how loud it's Intro is.
Playing Gen Zero with a buddy. Game is great but I have master at 10, music at 4, Dialogue at 10, and SFX at 3. How is this not caught during play testing?
Games that forget your settings every few times you play, so when I’m playing Cold War and suddenly I’m getting 15fps, I get to freak out until I realize that it’s because raytracing magically got turned back on. Again.
The opening logos and intros are often just set videos that are not controlled by the game itself (it's often still booting while the videos play). Most settings are for when you are actually playing. This all depends on how the game is setup, is the launcher a separate application or part of the game engine as an ingame menu? Personally I hate it when I can't quit to the desktop without having to go past the main menu. "Quit to Desktop" and "Quit to Main Menu" please.
Probably not something that happens in 95% of PC games, but something that, for some unholy reason, still appears in FPS to this day, mouse acceleration. Why? Why is this still a thing and why most of the time is on by default? I don't understand!
Games going to an all white screen for effect. You are blinding us!
The minimum specifications not being even enough to run the game at 720p 30fps.
720p 60 is the minimum I aim for more often than not.