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.

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

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”?

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?!

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 :)

• 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.

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.

• 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?

It's a niche gripe because i like achievement hunting, but it kills a lot of motivation for me in a game when there's separate achievements for a high difficulty. I feel like there's been only 3 times i actively enjoyed it out of all the game's i've done. That being Halo (it's like a right of passage for that game's culture, and Halo 2 is the only one that's the worst), Uncharted 4, and The Last of Us Part II.

There's also games that are just overloaded with stuff. I'm not sure how to describe it, but a lot of games i've run into just feel like they had a ton of stuff shoved in and it just throws me off. The Sonic adventure games were like this for me

For Stardew check your achievements and it will probably help to figure out what to do. If you made it to the island the room on the far west side has a checklist for getting "perfection" as well. When I finally got the movie theater I was also working on that checklist.

I like somewhat buggy messes like Oblivion, but if your game keeps randomly crashing on me, like New Veags without stability mods, I will be pretty peeved after a while.

Same with games like Oaken Tower where, even though I cannot prove it, I swear they lower the odds of finding the items you have and need until you cannot afford it after rerolls and level ups and such. That, or you have a max upgraded item and it won't stop giving you that specific item that you cannot use multiples of for whatever reason. Or you sell that item because it has stopped appearing in shop and decides to show up multiple times after selling and doing a singular reroll.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's a minor pet peeve but I've disliked it when games have multiple weapons that share ammo, especially when the game doesn't explicitly tell you this. Some examples of games that do this are Doom and Half-Life. The reason I dislike this, is mainly because of how I play shooters in general. I always try to preserve my ammo by prioritizing my weakest weapons but in games that do this, I'm actually potentially wasting ammo because I'll either have less ammo for the other, usually more powerful, weapon(s), or I might not even get to use that better weapon because I had no idea it shared ammo with a weaker weapon.

• 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.

• 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.

You should play Policenauts. Its a visual novel adventure game from Hideo Kojimas early days in 1994-1996 following a private eye investigating a disappearance on a space station.

When you load a save file, the game gives you a summary screen of the events in the game that have happened so far (at least it does in the SEGA Saturn version that I played). Its the first instance I recall of this happening in video games, and I do wish it could return in more games. Its possible that other games had this before, but if there was a game that did, I dont know it or remember it.

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.

Single saves. Me and husband have one computer (we're broke?) and too many games have a single save. So we can't play that game trading off cause there's only one save. Like Baldur's Gate 3? Amazing. Billion saves, hell a billion for each character even. Heaven's Vault? Wild Bastards? One save. Guh.

I have many pet peeves when it comes to games, but the biggest that I can think of off the top of my head is the boss fights in games that don't let you use the weapons & skills/techniques that you'd used to get to that point. It just pisses me off when they let you develop a character with particular skills and weapons only to force a particular combat style that's contrary to what you'd used up till that point.