If you are reading these words, you probably appreciate the video games and perhaps you have played many. We can all agree that video games are a source of high-quality entertainment (and more), designed to keep us entertained and to make every moment satisfying.
Obviously, however, not every single moment of the game is pleasant, sometimes not so much because the experience is bad overall, but because it asks us to do little things that cause annoyance or boredom. We like the game, but that specific thing we wish we could avoid doing it.
We therefore asked ourselves what game components or design choices we would really like were eliminated forever from the world of video games. Here’s what we have in mind.
Why are you so slow?
The mission starts, the non-player character approaches us and says: “walk with me“. Please, everything but this. We already know what is going to happen: he will walk slowly and we will have to keep taking little sprints back and forth to stay close enough to him.
The worst thing is when our character can both walk and run, but neither speed matches that of the other character. Luckily there are games (Red Dead Redemption 2 is an example) that have solved the issue, allowing you to press a button and make the character walk automatically according to a route. However, it should be the norm, not an exception, but is it still essential to abuse this narrative device?
Can you move the box three meters to the left for me?
Look, we get it, you have to hide the upload or you think it’s critical break the rhythm a bit and force the player to do something slow, but this is not a puzzle game: you certainly can’t ask them to solve an elaborate puzzle, but how many times do we have to move a crate so heavy that even the beefiest of video game heroes can’t move it more than a few centimeters per second?
Sometimes it’s not a crate, but a ladder, a dumpster, a floating pallet (Ellie, you haven’t learned to swim in a year, seriously?)… It doesn’t matter, we’re a bit tired of doing something so banal and slow.
One, two, three… star!
We love stealth games and are willing to spend hours sneaking around, but when an action game where you spend your time shooting and tearing apart enemies suddenly decides it’s time to introduce a stealth sectionthe blood goes to the head.
Our character is not meant for this type of experience and ourselves we are not in the slightest state of mind to do everything calmly. And why is it game over on the first try if we get caught?
Break! We have 25 lines of text for you to read
The tutorials are fundamental, because we cannot take it for granted that everyone already knows how to play, but even if it is our first time with the genre we cannot accept the idea of having to read lines and lines of text to figure out how to do something that should be simple.
If we take control of a new character or are faced with a new mechanic, we want the game to allow us to do only one new thing at a time, for example being able to only use the basic attack for a few moments, before unlocking the moves more advanced, so as to learn gradually. As soon as a page of text appears, we are immediately bored and do not want to read it and, above all, we already know that we will forget the explanation within a few minutes. Make us do things, instead of making us read about them.
Walk straight for 30 seconds, that’s super dramatic right?
Video games are interactive: This is what distinguishes them from other forms of entertainment. It is therefore a good idea to ensure that the user has control over as many gameplay moments as possible. It’s just that sometimes he exaggerates a little.
You know those scenes where the character was injured, we just came out of a cutscene and now we have to trudge in a random direction just to start another cutscene? We can’t do anything, the controls are all locked and the only thing that has an effect is tilting the stick forward, only the movement is ten times slower. We honestly can’t take it anymore. We assure you that we would prefer if it happened in a movie. Not everything has to be interactive.
From up there you can see everything
Ubisoft-style towers have long been a cliché, and players are a little tired of having to climb them. However, in our opinion the problem is not that it is an overused idea, but that it is used badly. Think The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or to a lesser extent Breath of the Wild. The towers in this case are small platform or puzzle challenges.
If instead we just have to go up to the top automatically without any kind of effort or reasoning, then we can also do without it. Towers have the advantage of being logical vantage points for seeing what’s around us and we’re fine with them being used to reveal the map, but please make us want to look for them.
The long march
Side missions can be a great way to lengthen a game and tell little additional stories, but there’s one thing we don’t love: walk back and forth. All too often side missions take much longer to reach a specific character, have us reveal the area where the actual mission will take place, walk to it, and then walk back to the starting point. And maybe in between we just defeated a couple of common enemies to get a useless reward.
If you really can’t create a quality mission, make sure that waste of time is minimal and that the missions do not unlock only after we have already explored the entire area. Make them available immediately so that as we reach the next plot segment we can naturally complete the activities placed in the middle and, above all, put the characters near fast travel or have us travel to them with just the press of a button (Final Fantasy 16 has realized it was the best idea).
