10 Gaming Problems That ANNOYED US FOR YEARS

Even the greatest games have small issues or flaws that drive us crazy. Here are some nitpicky examples.

No game is perfect. There's always something that is annoying. Like the weapon durability in Breath of the Wild, the long grind to the true ending in Arkham Knight. And sometimes you just gotta sweat the small stuff. Hi folks, today on TechyRanx, 10 incredibly minor things in games that piss us off. 

10. Connecting online in single-player games

Starting off with number 10, it's connecting online in single-player games. Like the convenience of the internet has a downside. More and more games out there want you to connect to the internet while you play. But we're not talking about requirements here, we're more talking about the minor annoyances. Like waiting for games to connect to the internet when you are just going to play single-player. And yes, this is a situation where, for the most part, the actual reason it's connected to the internet, allegedly, is to make saving easier and stuff like that, make it so you don't lose your game at any point. But they're also kind of making sure you're not pirating the game or cheating in some way. I mean, it's less that way on consoles, but still. I mean the Division series, and another notorious one was Watch Dogs: Legion. These were Ubisoft games, that's the common feature here. 

But when Watch Dogs: Legion came out, it didn't even have online features at all. It just connected to the internet for whatever reason and well, that's totally unnecessary. These games were playable offline just fine. So why not not screw it up? It might sound like a minor gripe, but that five to 20 seconds of waiting can really seem like a long time. 

09. Waiting around to talk to an NPC

At number nine, waiting around to talk to an NPC. Speaking of waiting, this is another pretty constant annoyance that you see in a lot of Bethesda RPGs, Fallout 3 and 4, and even way back to Skyrim. They all have NPCs that follow schedules in their day-to-day lives. Like at night, they go to bed. During the day, they go to their day job. It's cool, like when you think about it. And let's say you're a thief, it gives you some really good options to mess around with these people. Like you can sneak in during the day to rob them blind, or drink their blood at night because you're a vampire and you need their blood at night. Don't do it during the day, they're at their job. But there's a downside. Sometimes they wander around, just kind of doing whatever and you need to talk to them for whatever reason, be it a mission, or they have something that you need, whatever. And sometimes you're just like having to constantly press the wait button, meaning jumping ahead an hour in time because that NPC just is not showing up. Like they're off somewhere frolicking in a field or something. I don't know. It's annoying.

08. Having to spend money or use items to save

And at number eight, having to spend money or use items to save. I don't know why this was something that people thought was important. Like it's not a really particularly good difficulty adjustment. And at no point has it ever really made any sense for there not to be unlimited saves or at least the ability to save an unlimited number of times within a limited number of slots. And some developers clearly view us as spoiled brats for this reason. Like a lot of games from the Resident Evil series, for instance, require ink ribbons to save and you only find a limited amount of those during the course of the game. And then there's games like Donkey Kong Country where you actually have to pay gold coins to save. That means you have to go out and collect gold coins and pay to save the game. Thankfully, this hasn't really ever been like a microtransaction-oriented thing because I think that would make people pretty mad. But the practice hasn't exactly gone away. The Resident Evil 2 remake has a classic mode that reintroduces ink ribbons and they are, again, a limited resource. Another hardcore game from not that long ago, Kingdom Come: Deliverance keeps this, well, fairly annoying tradition alive. When that game released, in order to save anywhere, you had to drink saviour schnapps, which was obviously something you had to acquire. And in a game that's as hardcore as Kingdom Come, you kind of want to be able to save as often as possible. 

07. RPG with a luck stat

At number seven is any RPG with a luck stat. Out of all the stats, luck is the least defined. Will it increase your chances of dodging attacks? Will it improve your critical hits? Will it cause more items to drop from loot containers? Or will it do basically nothing? The luck stat always pisses us off just because it's the one we really don't know what to do with. Like luck appears years in games like Wasteland 3. But thankfully that gives you special perks as you level up, explaining exactly what benefits you'll get from luck. But other games, like Demon Souls, aren't really exactly forthcoming. And then there's a game, you go back a little ways, to Morrowind, and it has luck, but it's such an obscure thing. Most players have no idea how to level a stat up, what it does, how to practice it. I don't know, and it pisses me off. 

06. Loading after swapping characters

At number six is loading after swapping characters. Here's an annoyance that, I think for the most part, is slowly going to be phased out thanks to SSD drives. Like it's becoming pretty instantaneous on consoles. So the long load time might be a thing of the past, but it's still really annoys us whenever it appears in some games. Like go back to Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Origins, they include this eagle companion and if he strays too far away from you, you have to settle in for some loading when you swap back to the assassin, which feels dumb. It feels like there's gotta be some way to avoid that. The same problem persisted in another game not long ago in Watch Dogs: Legion, which is a game that is basically about swapping characters. Even games like Grand Theft Auto 5 have some issues with character swapping. Instead of driving around in tricked out super cars you've unlocked, they appear in crappy basic models. And if we're going really far back, the few seconds it takes to swap characters in Castlevania 3 is fairly nerve-racking actually. 

05. Hidden loading screens

At number five is hidden loading screens. The era of slow walking while talking on the radio is hopefully almost over with, like what I said earlier, the SSD drives. But this was a widespread phenomenon that's mostly due to the slow loading of Unreal Engine 3, the version of Unreal that was most prominent during the PS3 and Xbox 360 era. Every game with this engine features tons of very slow walking, like opening shutters with allies or boosting friends up over ledges, purely to mask load times. Like ridiculous close quarters walking, like passing through a tiny little area where your character turns to the side and tiptoes basically. Like every single Gears of War game features some really annoying little activities and rip offs like 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand also do that. The original Mass Effect is a heavy hitter when it comes to this. Although they didn't really do anything to make it seem like you weren't on a loading screen. 'Cause you would be on these long elevator rides, and it wouldn't say "Loading." But like you would say to yourself, "It's loading in this elevator, that's what's going on" Hell, even the Uncharted games have a bunch of slowly pushing open doors, turning cranks, or pausing to watch a cut scene. I mean, I do actually kind of like cut scenes to mask loading time. At least something's happening. 

04. Super clunky character customization

And at number four, when character customization is super clunky. Like I love character customization games. I can spend hours on them, slowly tweaking little values until I've got the perfect look. But some games make that straight up impossible. Games like Anthem, which has a slew of its own problems beyond this, and Destiny, which is actually a pretty good game. Both have really bare minimum options to make your character look unique. Everyone really might as well be a generic model, once you equip gear that covers you up anyways. And then there's games that are just way too much, like far too fiddly. Among all of the other problems that WWE 2K20 had, when designing a wrestler, no matter how many sliders you adjust, the character pretty much always looks bad. Same goes for open world games, like Fallout 3 and Oblivion. Some sliders affect other sliders. Like you mess with a jaw slider, suddenly the head slider's all wonky. Fallout 4 at least improved on this front a bit. Like pretty much every character creator that's like this makes you wish that they would just adapt the Sims 4 character creation for everything. 

03. No crouch sneak mode

At number three is no crouch sneak mode. Splinter Cell introduced the world to the crouch walk. It's the default sneak mode in games, and it took way too long for other games to adopt the best movement mode in gaming history. Like it took until Assassin's Creed Unity before that stealth series touched on the crouching sneak. And Metal Gear Solid didn't get crouching movement until Peace Walker. Before the crouch walk, you just had a lumber around like the world's biggest barely mobile secret agent. Other games had crouch movement, but it was basically useless. I'm looking at you Hitman. From Hitman 2 to Hitman: Blood Money, your crouch is so ridiculously slow that it's useless for sneaking up on an enemy. But crouch sneaking quickly became a staple of FPS games, probably just that you didn't have to animate anything extra. 

02. Floaty ladders of death

And at number two, floaty ladders of death. Ladders are gonna be a problem until the end of time. They're getting better in games. Like Alien: Isolation kind of lock you in so you climb ladders safely, but that is not every game. Going back to Death Stranding, ladders become breakable under heavy weight. Or if your placement isn't exactly right, they'll just slip. But we're not talking about okay ladders or ones with unique mechanics like Death Stranding, we're talking about the dark age of ladders, like the original Half-Life, Doom 3, and a bunch of other FPS games, that made ladders the most dangerous traversal method on the planet. Instead of climbing up and down ladders, you float and hopefully don't slip off. 

01. Can't restart a checkpoint

And finally at number one, when you can't just restart a checkpoint. Even awesome games have this mistake. PlatinumGames developed hardcore action games that let you score every battle you're in. Sometimes you'll mess up. You want to try again for better ranking. But Platinum makes simply reloading checkpoints impossible in lots their games. You have to exit to the main menu then continue instead of simply reloading from the pause screen. Bayonetta and Wonderful 101 have this incredibly annoying oversight because those are both awesome games. And some of us have a sick compulsion to earn perfect platinum rank in every enemy encounter. And for plenty of games, that wouldn't be an issue. Nobody needs to reload saves constantly in a Mario game. But in Platinum games, of course I'd like to give those encounters a second try. 

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