I have no idea where to write it, so I’ll write here. I got the free month of Origin Access from the 2FA giveaway, and decided to - among other games - try Furi. It seemed like such a cool game, but then the tutorial boss forced me to repeatedly parry his hits to even deal some damage. And I hate both parrying (in 90% of games) and when a game forces me to do one specific thing within a compulsory tutorial to be able to progress. So, the magic went like that. Anyways, if you have any things that make you uninstall the game instantly, even small and irrational ones, you can share them here
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The ‘Abili-tease’ – giving your character all their full power at the start of the game to show you what you’ll be like endgame and then stripping you of said power through some contrived means. Stupid. Just start me weak and let me discover everything myself.
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I personally hate it when a game has a character’s personality boil down either to one word or a wikipedia article.
I like relationships that develop organically, rather than telling me YOU LIKE THIS CHARAcTEr BECAUSE THEY ARE tHE BeSt or worse yet LoVE THIS cHARACTER cAUsE We TOlD YoU ToO!
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The classic. My favourite Castlevania game too -_-
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If the tutorial goes on for more than 15 minutes, I am very likely to quit. If the game has so many mechanics that the tutorial takes for about an hour to complete, then I’d prefer them to be taught throughout the game in small tutorial parts, instead of making me try and swallow everything in the start.
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Sometimes fanservise can be this for me. I am not against it, but in some japanese and western anime-inspired games (action, vn, jrpg etc), the creators feel the need to include lazy scenes that all look too similar, with female characters beating the ___ out of male characters for accidentaly seeing them naked, or with everyone going to bath\beach, or suddenly the heroines have to put on weirdly revealing clothes FOR THE PLOT, and all the time these scenes start, there’s that cheap, trying-to-be-funny, weirdly corny music with awkward audio effects, no matter what type of game. At first I wasn’t used to these types of scenes so saw them as a genuine part of the stories, then I got used to them and thought they were the unescapable, boring evil. But as for now, I’ve seen too much of this, it immediately breaks any immersion, and if the scene is longer than 3 minutes, I quit.
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One of my pet peeves is when a platformer has forward momentum. Just be like Mega Man III and let forward be forward; don’t make me hold backwards just to stop sooner (or worse, be like N++ and make it so slopes also alter how high you jump).
Oh, we’re going that far. In that case, I got Dark Souls III from that one Humble Monthly, and very early in the game (in the level right after the first boss), I went down the first staircase, locked onto the skeleton dog, and was promptly shot in the back by an archer hidden on a ledge behind me. Yup, the game has a habit of hiding enemies in places you won’t see them until it’s too late. To make matters worse, sometimes, when you die and make it back to that area, you can’t even lock onto the enemy before triggering them, making it harder to doge or block their cheap hits even though you know they’re coming.
To make matters worse, any enemy that isn’t the lowest cannon-fodder mook has inconsistent AI. Will blocking their attacks stun them or stun you? Will they do one attack or a full combo (which will hit you if you try dodging away from them)? Will they just keep attacking forward in said combo, or will they instantly turn around to hit you after you dodge around them? Games are normally made so that the player always has a way to overcome the enemies, but in this game, it’s the opposite: the enemies always have a way to counter whatever you do, no matter how good you get.
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STRONGLY disagree with everything you’ve asserted here. I know the archer you’re talking about and if this is how far into the game you got then you can’t have enough experience with it to make these claims. The AI in dark souls 3 is very consistent. The whole point of the game is to “git gud” and I can tell you personally that it’s possible, I struggled with it a lot but found myself able to overcome in the end.
First of all you can get to that archer before going down the stairs, now that you know he’s there you can get the drop on him. Just walk through the break in the wall to the platform he’s on and kill him, then you can drop down and deal with the dogs.
As for attack animations, single attacks and combo attacks have different animations so once you learn what to look for in an enemy you can tell what they’re about to do and respond accordingly. Most enemies have tracking combos, as in they will turn mid or between swings and this is definitely a per enemy quality, not something that happens randomly.
Your issue with whether you get stunned from blocking or not sounds like you’re not watching your stamina. You’ll get stunned if you block when out of stamina. Blocking never stuns an enemy, parrying does. It’s also well worth learning to fight without locking onto enemies, it should not be your default action every time you encounter something.
While I certainly agree the game does have a handful of annoying ambushes that’ll get you the first time through, the primary advice I will give is that of caution. Never rush into anything, keep your distance to enemies and watch them. The first thing you want to learn about a new foe is how to avoid them, then you figure out how to attack them.
This rant brought to you by the pet peeve of people proclaiming incorrect facts about a game they never played enough to know.
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was actually waiting for this, and it’s good
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OMG I loved Furi. Everything about the game appealed to me, game play, soundtrack and art style.
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Going to simply toss in my hat to say that if the game gives off that impression at start I would say that @Imaynotbehere4long has more than enough experience to talk about the opening of the game, if nothing else.
Some games may have much deeper levels, but they also can leave misleading impressions. If you played say ‘Spec Ops the Line’ for only the 1st mission, it would just be another military shooter.
I would say that a game may not be for everyone, but if a game is trying to do something special with an existing formula (or just uses a different formula), it may leave the wrong impression for someone that is not enjoying the game itself.
Is this necessarily anyone’s fault? I would say no… And it isn’t like we are talking about a game reviewer not completing the tutorial.
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I personally like parry mechanics in games. It’s really satisfying to me to perfectly block each of an enemy’s moves and then deal a devastating blow, but I get that it’s not everyone’s thing. My brother and I are both fans of the Dark Souls series, but while I loved the pants off of Sekiro, my brother couldn’t stand it because he prefers buff, tank-y builds, but Sekiro emphasizes fast, parry-heavy builds.
Compulsory tutorials I totally get, though. A good example of this is Monster Hunter World, where if you want to create a new character, you have to go through the exact same long-ass tutorial sequence that you did the first time around. There’s no way of speeding past it or skipping it, you’re just stuck re-doing it. On top of that, the game is filled with unskippable cutscenes, so if you don’t care about the story or have already gone through the game, tough luck.
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True to some extent, except there’s a huge difference between your example of just playing the first level of spec ops because it IS just another military shooter for that level and the game starts differentiating itself later on. In the case of DS3 even if you get the impression that shit is whack, yo. This is you being wrong because your impression is not based on what’s actually there, it stems from your inattentiveness and possibly misunderstanding something. So yes that is your fault. Though you can argue back and forth about how games communicate things to the player but your incorrect assumptions remains incorrect.
The description as it has been given given does not apply to even the part that HAS been experienced.
It also matters how you express yourself. If you say you quit darksouls because you feel like it’s an impossible mess to get your head around and you didn’t enjoy the game enough to continue. Then sure, by all means, that’s owning your reasons to quit and we all play games for different reasons so that’s fine.
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I certainly won’t disagree about the opinion not being supported by further experience of the game. BUT (and just to play devils advocate here) I think that is perhaps more interesting while examining pet peeves, because at their core pet-peeves are us reacting counter to how the game wants us to react from information it communicates to us.
An example, which makes fun of me,
I ran a lot of paper and pencil homebrew games back in the day. One of these was set in a post apocalyptic future (it was the 2000’s everything was post-apocalyptic back in those days), and saw the players trying to navigate the newly arisen societies.
The party invaded a tower of a society of assassins. Their prolonged battle was eventually won, and I described the contents of the chest they looted. As I talked about the vial of green liquid found in the pocket of one guard, one player grabbed it and immediately applied it to a wound they sustained on their forearm (no discussion of why).
When I, being an ass, began to mock the player for such a stupid decision. Obviously it was a vial of poison, and such an action brought on a nearly lethal amount of damage to the character. The player (a Pokemon fan), then began to debate that green meant health, so their assumption was that the item must be a healing item.
That player still has a pet peeve where they hate when games have ‘mystery effects’ which might be inferred by color and Nothing Else.
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I’m with @Imaynotbehere4long and @hivefleetbothan. Not going to extrapolate because I don’t feel like articulating my opinion and defending it.
I don’t know if I have anything that’ll make me uninstall a game if I run across it. I think it’s because I tend to vet the games I get before getting them.
Well except maybe hackers.
A few of the things that annoy me though are:
Escort Quests. Let’s auto spawn enemies that you specifically have to fight and force to you go at a snail’s pace while doing so.
And
Trailers that have zero gameplay. I want to see the combat system. Not all story or here’s all the characters.
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My goodness, I didn’t even realize how much I hate this until you brought it up and I reflected on it…
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Speaking of trailers, I don’t really like those pseudo realistic dark looking trailer. I’m not mad at Blur and other VFX studios taking on these projects, the big guys at Hollywood sure aren’t going to pay them much, but for me no matter how interesting the story or content shown is, I’m not terribly a fan as they are nearly identical with colours looking like everything around them is desperate and bleak and hopeless and whatever, action scenes that look fine but can be a bit too flashy in my opinion and having rather stilted animation. This next part is not related to gaming, but it’s also annoying that most of them can’t even show those on a cropped screen properly in the correct aspect ratio what. (context: I have a phone that is a wider screen than 16:9) I think they aren’t given a lot of time to work on those, though, and also are restricted by whatever the publisher and studio demands, so maybe it leads to them looking way too similar.
I should stress not all of them are bad. The Halo 2 cutscenes by Blue do fit in quite nicely towards the game’s setting, even if I never played them before. And I think those that have a less realistic style, while also samey, is less monotonous than the usual. I didn’t play Apex Legends since launch period, but the trailers have a more distinct visual style, giving a comic book style. Some were giving comparisons to Into the Spider Verse, though many would probably get frustrated if you do say that. Again, I didn’t watch the other ones, only the initial launch trailer. So maybe they made it like those pseudo realistic trailers I’m not a fan of, idk.
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Well, that sure blew up after I left. I hope I don’t make things worse by trying to clarify myself.
Sorry for not clarifying how far I was. I beat the Deacon of the Deep and made it to the Abyss Watchers before giving up.
I’ve never understood that mentality. If something is designed so that even skilled players can’t react to it, causing a cheap hit (or worse, a cheap death), that’s no longer a skill-based challenge; it’s just rote memorization. Even if you don’t see this as objectively bad design, you have to admit that if an ambush is designed to “get you the first time,” you’ll have to redo the non-ambush-sections you’ve proven you can get past, which is padding at best. What’s worse is that it’s not just in the beginning: the game does this regularly (we both know it does). Even if I’m wrong with everything else, those ambushes are still enough to make me not want to play the game again.
I’ve had single attacks drain most (if not all) of my stamina bar, resulting in a stun. Maybe that’s still “my” fault for not leveling it up, but on top of stat increases being minimal, “RPG mechanics” have also become a pet peeve of mine. If it’s an action game, just design the difficulty curve around fixed stats; it’s easier on developers because they know exactly how strong players will be, and it’s easier on players because they know they won’t be under-powered. At best, there’s effectively no difference between it being there or not; it just comes off as a cheap way to add a feeling of progression, as if the rest of the game isn’t able to do a good job of that by itself. (and if you want to bring character builds into this, that’s what character selection is for)
Oh, and while we’re at it, I’m gonna go ahead and add stamina bars to my list of pet peeves. A game based around dodging, blocking, and attacking that punishes you for dodging, blocking, and attacking “too much” by taking away your ability to block and attack, especially when certain enemies (cough Cathedral Grave Warden cough) have quick combos and quick recoveries that don’t give the player much time to recover said stamina, even without blocking? At best, that just needlessly drags out the game since the player can’t attack as often (also, punishes newcomers for taking too long to find an opening). I’m sure there’s a way to make the game challenging without handicapping the player for playing the game, especially since it doesn’t seem like enemies are burdened with their own stamina limitations.
Are you sure? I did try looking for that during my play-through, but seem to remember the skeleton ax-wielders from the Cathedral of the Deep doing a horizontal ax swing as both a single attack and a combo opener.
I also used these guys as a test case since one is right after the second bonfire in the undead settlement, but had a similar issue where sometimes it would track me and other times it would just keep attacking straight (was it just a glitch?):
And then there’s the Abyss Watchers, which rolls all of my issues with the game into one boss fight (on top of having a second phase where it gets longer reach, making it even harder to dodge). I guess I won’t be convinced unless I see a video showing a complete breakdown of each first-attack-animation, exactly how many hits will result from it, and how to avoid damage reliably every time, so I’ll drop that particular argument right now. You win.
P.S. Things I forgot to mention that I don’t like about Dark Souls 3:
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Some enemies can break out of being stunned by your attack combo, and since you can’t interrupt your attack animation to dodge, this results in you taking a hit and being stun-locked into their combo. This may or may not be exclusive to the Abyss Watchers, where I know for a fact that it’s random whether or not they break out or keep being stunned.
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The game seemingly isn’t designed around fighting multiple enemies at once. On top of the previously mentioned inability to interrupt attack animation to dodge, openings to attack enemies are often small and enemy patterns are asynchronous, so the second enemy can start attacking you when the first one is finishing up its combo, effectively covering for it, giving you no time to counter until later. And later. And later…by the way, did I mention that the Abyss Watcher summons an ally after losing enough health?
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The game sometimes puts bonfires (checkpoints) in out-of-the-way locations, so if you go the “wrong” way in a split path (or don’t notice the split), you’ll miss them. This is also something the game starts doing early on, just like with the ambushes.
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Getting back on topic: another pet peeve I have is when an action game’s hard mode only affects HP, attack, and/or defense. That doesn’t make the game harder; it makes the game more tedious.
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My main gripe with PC gaming is not being able to rebind keys in a modern game. It really annoys me when I see it. I get that lots of games are ports from console but surely they could spare some time to add rebinding to the PC version. It annoys me so much it’s the first thing I look for in the menu. If a game allows rebinding I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
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