Lack of gameplay options and cheats. I've never thought a game was worse because it had cheats. Quite the contrary.

Purposely obtuse mechanics for the sake of "difficulty."

My major pet peeves with games is that features available in a game are often absent in a sequel, or revamped for no reason. Unless a game receives critical reception these days, I often buy games that have been released a year ago to increase the chance they get fixed with patches.

Example: the notorious Civilization series.

Since Steam implemented the notes feature, I can remember what to do, like if I don't have time to explore a place but the game already marked visited simply because I went there, etc.

Broadly, where the optimal path is the boring or tedious path.

Imagine an action game where you fight monsters and get coins for defeating them. Coins can be exchanged to buy new moves, advance the plot, and so on. Basic game loop.

Now imagine that you get triple coins if you wear the red shirt when fighting red monsters. Every time you see a red monster, you could go into the menu, into equipment, into body armor, swap on the red shirt, exit all the menus, and kill the monster. Then repeat all that for blue shirt and blue monsters.

This is a made up example but some games do shit like that, where you have to do something tedious for a big payoff.

When games have a designated button to show interactive elements in the environment

This just screams "we don't know how to make an uncluttered game"

I've often wondered why some more advanced games like Elder Scrolls don't keep track of dramatic actions in some way and offer them up to you when you leave the game for a while. A "previously..." kind of element. Big budget action games too, like from Rockstar.

Obviously they just don't think it's worth the work, but I do wonder if it would affect completion rates.

Games that dont let you skip the tutorial and all cutscenes. Like I get that most people want to watch the story or read the dialogue but I dont.

Games that are to easy. Its so annoying when a good game spends way to long scaling up the difficulty and you have to play for like 10 hours before the fights stop being completely mindless. Its such a waste of time.

My last pet peeve is for sandbox games and myself. Its so annoying when I have built a thing that has a lot of intergrated parts and then I decide to do a massive redesign of some part. Then I remove the parts and dont finish building the replacement. So next time i log in im immediately hit with an entire system that doesnt work and I have try clean up my own mess.

When you first start playing, you should be in a room that's moderately graphically intense and you can stand there indefinitely doing nothing. I need some time to dial in my graphics settings and controls. I hate when a game immediately drops you into a combat situation and I'm joining the action 5 seconds at a time as I twiddle with settings.

Games that don’t act like they are games. Too many designers think they are making “high art”. Examples:

Not being able to save any time for any reason - I have a life, stuff happens. I need to be able to save and leave the game at any time - during gameplay, dungeons, cutscenes, any time. Make it a suspend state if it must - but respect reality.

Non-pausable cutscenes - you are not the most important part of my life so you need to be able to pause without losing content.

Non-skippable cutscenes - I might have seen this 10 times before, let me skip.

Dialogue history - if you let me skip dialogue then you must have a dialogue history. I might have hit the skip button by accident so let me see what I missed.

Indicate when there isn’t new dialogue - make the chat options change when there is new dialogue, making it so I have to interact with the NPC or object again just to see if there is new dialogue is infuriating.

Show when an activity will fail - don’t make me search barrels that are empty. Skyrim does this perfectly.

If you have a map let me annotate it - somehow a magicly populating map is allowed in your world but I don’t have a pencil to write “come back here with a shovel”?

My job. No seriously, that’s my pet peeve. I could play so many more great games if I didn’t have to work.

When you're watching a dramatic cutscene, but then someone needs your attention, so you hit esc... which skips the cutscenes instead of pausing?! What the actual fuck? The button that pauses the game in every other context now (surprise!) skips the cutscene? Why would you do that?!

• Games should have some way to take notes in game.
• External wikis are great and I love them, but they aren't an excuse for not explaining how your game works within your game. There needs to be good in game guides.
• All games need some way to save and quit. Looking at you, rogue likes. People have lives. That's more important than protecting some weird form of honor by making the excuse that it's to prevent save scumming.

Internet for single player.

I love Hitman, but the need to be connected to a server just to play rubs me the wrong way.

This is specifically for rhythm games, but I hate it when they don't give you a judgement error during the play (early/late indicators) or a total of early/late hits in the results screen.

Even when they do show that information, sometimes they don't even tell you by how much on average in ms, only the amount of hits that are early and late. You could be consistently late by as small as 5ms, or something stupid like 50ms but you wouldn't know. And now you just have to eyeball the offset adjustment, going back and forth, in and out between the settings menu and a song to check if you did it right.

Oh, and I hope the game uses millisecond offset instead of some esoteric arbitrary scale with no label — bonus points if it's not granular enough to set right so you end up with an offset that is either uncomfortably early or uncomfortably late no matter what you do.

And also, the offset calibration tool is useless in every rhythm game. It does not help whatsoever, and if anything it makes it more confusing to set things up :)

• I don't give the slightest fuck who provided the middleware for the cloth physics, stop impeding me from playing the game to show me this shit every fucking time I launch it.
• Continue and New Game are often the wrong way around in the main menu. Why would you have New Game at the top/default selection position? How often would someone be clicking that as opposed to Continue?
• Unskippable dialogue and cut-scenes. I've read devs describe cut-scenes as a reward for the player achieving a certain milestone. I see them as punishment. Especially so if I want to replay the game. It's a game, not a movie. Leave me the fuck alone already.
• It should be forbidden to sell a game on Steam that requires an account and launcher from Ubisoft or whoever. If you sell it on Steam, you use Steam, and if you wanna use your own shit then you don't get to use the Steam storefront and must forgo all the advertising and exposure you enjoy there.
• Walk-and-talks, especially when my normal walk speed is like a sprint compared to that of the NPC in question.
• Narratively, my character is a saviour to a group of people who provide me with weapons and ammo to help me save them, but the cunts charge me for it?? "Hey thanks for single-handedly saving us and fighting the tyrannical evil empire, while you're out there risking life and limb for us please use our cool weapons and bullets! That'll be 500 credits, cheers!" Motherfucker? What are you even spending it on? WHERE are you even spending it?
• Fake endings. I was playing RDR2, and thought I was coming to the end of the game, all signs pointed to an imminent ending. So I was mentally in a place where I was ready to pack up and uninstall it, just had to finish the last few quests, already wondering what I'd play next. Then there's an entire 500-hour chapter that comes after. So I keep going, and am constantly thinking "surely it's just another quest or two..." but it just never fucking ends. Had I known or expected all this extra shit, it would be different. But I was already halfway out they door before you called me back in for another week's worth of the same malarkey.
• Time-wasting as a core mechanic. I love No Man's Sky, but so many of the quests in that game involve literally waiting 24 real-world hours for the next phase of the quest. Which, when completed, leads to another 24-hour wait. Who exactly does this serve?

When you know a choice you made should have immediate or impending consequences, but the world carries on as if it's business as usual. I was actually surprised when the opposite happened in Outer Worlds 2 recently. If you trigger a certain event and don't go deal with it ASAP, it will happen without you and there are consequences.

Unpausable and unskippable cutscenes

So many games have like ~10-15 seconds of unskippable logos whenever you open the game and it pisses me off every single time. I don't understand why they still do this.

Menu -> Exit Game -> Yes

Scroll Down - > Exit Game -> Yes

Scroll Down -> Exit to Desktop -> Yes

Exit Launcher -> Yes

Jackbox is one of the worst offenders of this. Have to exit 4 times to actually exit the game.

Biggest pet peeve of modern games is when the game repeatedly nags the player to go to the next mission or solve a puzzle. I like to explore games, to take the time to appreciate well made environments and lore, but when npcs or even the pc keep chiming in every minute with "[x] is waiting for me at the lab" or "I think I should [y]", it starts to piss me off.

It's like they don't trust the player to play the game "right". Games are more than just sprinting from one objective to another. Can't even take the time to fully look over a puzzle before the game starts telling you what to do next.

• Games that offer stealth as an option over combat, but have mandatory combat bosses.
• games that have excessive grinding as part of the main gameplay.
• Games where randomness is the primary factor in winning and losing.

• Games that jump straight into things without letting me see the options menu first.

• Not having the Playstation icons as a preset when I want to use my PS4 controller on PC.

I started keeping a Note on my phone titled Game Diary with different sections for games I’m playing, and write down what I was doing, my train of thought and what I wanted to do next, things I had to check on our fix etc, at the time I put it down. It’s helped immensely when I come back to something after a while and encounter exactly what you’re talking about.

Any game ported to the PC needs to recognize controllers that are plugged in after launch and need to have a "quit to desktop" option.

Yeah I have a bad habit of never finishing games despite playing the first 1/4 of the game several times.

I need a refresher like TV shows do when they come back for a new season.