Mastodawn

Ami Angelwings Feb 26

For me: tech trees

I don't necessarily hate tech trees, some games work great with them, but a lot of games make them overly complicated or don't explain to you well what each choice does or mean, or don't allow respecs giving you tons of stress, or the entire system is confusing or have too many choices and you have to do one for every single character or the game doesn't even need a tech tree because the game should just be a simple platformer (looking at you Mirror's Edge Catalyst)

I'm also a player that generally just likes to make use of what they're given, I don't mind RPGs that don't let me customize my character to the point that every character can use any spell or class or whatever, I'm fine with "this is what you got, figure out how to best use it"

This is one I do dislike so technically it's not really an answer to my question because I'm not sure there's a single game I like it's inclusion in, but "selling salvage", I don't mean selling materials that you could use to craft stuff, but the whole thing where instead of dropping money, enemies just drop junk/animal parts/etc so it's "realistic" and you end up loading your inventory up with 500 useless things so you constantly have to go to a vendor to press the "sell all salvage" button just to get the money you would normally get in an older "less realistic" RPG from killing things

Claire, The Ultimate Worrier Feb 27

@ami_angelwings there's a lot of wow add ons to auto sell this kind of crap when you go to a vendor lol

@waitworry in CoH you get "influence" or "infamy" if you're a villain for defeating mobs which is used as currency so they skip the whole need to explain how you're getting money from killing like a robot or a zombie or rikti monkey

You're just becoming more influential by doing good deeds and then people give you things cuz your influential but because you're using your influence to pay for things I guess that makes you less influential because it makes you look bad but then you kill/"arrest" more things and then it makes you look good and you become influential or something

And then you can sell things on the auction house for other people's influence

CoH operates on basically just one big IOU system xD

The Girl With Two Podcasts Feb 27

@ami_angelwings this one kinda works if it's a situation where selling enough of a particular kind of junk unlocks purchases with some vendor. I can't remember exactly what games have done this but I think FFXII was one of them?

Thepi Feb 27

@SophiaSurname @ami_angelwings The original Final Fantasy XII had a fucked up hybrid selling/crafting salvage system that was something like, selling a set of items at the bazaar would add item packs that you could buy - which is really cool world building because it implies there's craftspeople at the bazaar who actually use the stuff that they buy. BUT if you actually bought something it would reset all progress towards any other item packs your sold items had contributed towards. So if you'd been using the 'sell all' button instead of looking up a guide and only selling what you need to for the items you want, you'd probably never get anything that relied on rare drops - and there were probably some that relied on boss drops that you were permanently screwed out of.

Feb 26

@ami_angelwings “truth serum” that makes the victim a blabbermouth to every question

★ 凪鈴【Nagirin】 (Anastácia) 茸形 Feb 26

@ami_angelwings revenge

MWT Feb 26

@ami_angelwings secret saboteurs in a group of collaborators working toward a common goal.

M Nesce Drake Feb 26

I hate the slow screen blackout that happens about 10 times in every movie trailer. A couple I can understand, fair enough, but then there's the horrendous overuse that goes 0.5 sec movie -- slow blackout -- 0.5 sec movie -- slow blackout x 6.

I loathe this with a passion that knows no bounds!

ShawnT 🔧🐀Feb 26

@ami_angelwings You curiously pick up an item, but then can't discard it, because the game won't allow it. You know who wants it, but they won't take it yet for reasons yet to be learned, so it sits there in your inventory, weighing down your bag. You lose stamina.

Manic Emo Dream Ghoul Feb 26

@ami_angelwings English language high school something seems to have a mandatory formal/deb/prom/ball, and for some reasons everyone in that verse treat it extremely seriously. Like who even consider that shit more fun than the afterparty anyway.

❌Feb 26

@ami_angelwings as I'm primarily in the reading webnovels space, litrpg. The idea of game-ifying a person's capabilities. Done right it can be a great addition. But I constantly see it done oh so wrong and used as powerscaling crutch. Instead of being the driving force behind a character's development, it should only ever serve as a more digestible representation of the skills they've earned themselves, not by killing the same monster a dozen times for example

Karel P Kerezman Feb 26

@mstar yesssss.

I can and have enjoyed LitRPG-based stories, but yegods so many of them are laaaaaaazyyyyyy.

Matt Feb 26

Any zombie thing: character hides the fact that they're bitten. "It's nothing, just a scratch."

jack Feb 26

@ami_angelwings most fanservice

Rosy Feb 26

@ami_angelwings I don't like when videogame style stats or levels are mentioned in books or anime, just feels weird and ruins the immersion. I like grinding and levelling up in an actual game but outside of that format, it doesn't work for me. Recently I was reading a book and it kept talking about how so and so had a qi or spirit level of 8000 or something and I was like how do you concretely measure something like this? Plus it feels like telling instead of showing. If someone is strong I want to see them doing stuff, not just a high score

Jake in the desert Feb 26

@ami_angelwings flashbacks was my first thought. It's a plague these days. Just makes for confusion and nonsense.

FoolishOwl Feb 26

@ami_angelwings Setting a very large scale or scope to the setting for a story. It's not inherently more exciting when the fate of the galaxy is at stake than when the fate of the village is at stake, and it's a lot easier to keep a balance between the intimate and the public when the scale is smaller.

Karel P Kerezman Feb 26

@foolishowl @ami_angelwings I would like to cosign this response. Even if the conflict going on *in the world* of the story is huge, the stakes for the *story itself* should be more manageable, and I feel like that idea has been rejected by most movie-and-show-makers.

Benjamin Feb 26

@ami_angelwings Romance in videogames that are not specifically romance VNs. Some games it's entirely optional, but others push it so much in-your-face that avoiding or declining it is exhausting.
In TV, uh... what's it called... "counter-running narratives"? When two narratives run parallel, but counter to each other, like "present time" and "past time" and "future time" narratives that converge at some point, but intentionally leave the viewer in the dark about important information.

Sherri W (SyntaxSeed)Feb 26

@ami_angelwings Shaky cam. 😖

MWT Feb 27

@syntaxseed @ami_angelwings hard agree. It's a cinematic innovation where the camera becomes one of the characters. However it gives me motion sickness and makes a large amount of modern film unwatchable. Just hold still and show me the scene ffs.

Sherri W (SyntaxSeed)Feb 27

@mwt @ami_angelwings I feel about it the same way I feel about rumble in a game controller. It takes me out of the immersion & reminds me of the medium - that I exist in the real world not in the scene. 🙅‍♀️

Every Other Dracula Feb 26

@ami_angelwings Easily avoided superhero fights. The kind where a few seconds of conversation could have settled the matter but no one wants to listen to each other.

It's fine occasionally, like sometimes there are misunderstandings, sure. But when it's wildly out of character, old friends who've known each other for years suddenly make ridiculous assumptions, stuff like that, I hate it.

Every Other Dracula Feb 26

@ami_angelwings This rant brought to you by an issue of The Defenders I just read that was nothing but one long Hulk vs. Namor fight happening for absolutely no reason.

Press Rouch Feb 26

@ami_angelwings Crafting. It's okay in small doses but I recently started KOTOR II and was dismayed to see the massive crafting menu.

Manic Emo Dream Ghoul Feb 27

@ami_angelwings Here's something I like, until Jodie Picoult abused the shit out of it: using different fonts for each characters. I don't mind this by anyone else. She just doesn't know how to write any narratives that isn't a single Redditor's voice without it.

@BigShellEvent I have never read any of her actual prose, I only know her from when DC Comics was on their "getting real book authors to write for them to expand the audience and get clout" phase (which failed) and they put her on Wonder Woman and she turned Wonder Woman into a spy who was hot for her male spy partner and the entire thing was a terrible romance with occasional fighting thrown in, and also Circe took up the mantle of Wonder Woman and was killing sex traffickers and rapists and telling Diana that she sucks because she's not protecting women and instead she's given up being WW by being a spy and then Diana is like but killing sex traffickers is wrong, and then Hercules showed up or something

Manic Emo Dream Ghoul Feb 27

@ami_angelwings I'm not even a comic reader and I knew of that hot mess. Which... Is slightly better than her novels, believe it or not.

midnight posting Feb 27

@ami_angelwings Interminably long intros in video games. Please, it’s been 45 minutes and I need some reassurance I won’t have to do this again. Just let me save.

@trashwizard I especially hate it when those intros involve you stuck in a "walk" animation and your aren't allowed to do anything else but walk along a preset path and look at what they tell you to look at, but YOU have to do this, it's not a cutscene, even though it could have been, at instead you're forced to just press forward while your character walks slower than anybody's ever walked in history

midnight posting Feb 27

@ami_angelwings Otherwise? Media that gives you the juicy plot piece and then cliffhanger it to do boring things with the story. They just had their first real fight! Things are out into the open! She’s slapped him and thrown him out! Oh my god! It’s … time to do some puzzles on a side plot. Nooooooooooooooo

mg. kit Feb 27

@ami_angelwings in games? crafting, grinding, gambling, bad tutorials, unskippable cutscenes and dialogue

in writing? obvious or unresolved misunderstandings, bad communication in general, love triangles, the hero's journey, slavery, might makes right, virtuous wealth, sexism, LGBTQ+ characters not being allowed to just exist and instead always having to justify themselves or "face their demons"

these are all things I do just plain dislike, because I'm having a really hard time thinking of anything that really fits the prompt. most things that bother me always bother me, it's so rarely just a matter of poor execution or overuse to me

I suppose I could say unambiguously good vs unambiguously evil, but even then, is it really that I'm only bothered by it being done badly or too often, or is it more that the remarkably few times I've seen it done in a way I could actually enjoy make up the exception rather than the rule? same thing for open worlds in games, because I don't really hate the concept of them, but the fact that I can only think of maybe two that I really enjoyed gives me pause

mg. kit Feb 27

@ami_angelwings wait, I thought of a real one:

subversion

now, I love a good subversion of genre, mechanics, tropes, whatever. and a lot of them are good! but sometimes, especially in recent times, it feels like some things are trying to be subversive just for the sake of being subversive without actually doing anything interesting or having anything to say

@kit yeah it's to the point that you EXPECT the subversion and anything that plays something straight is ironically the thing that's subversive and refreshing

Cassandra is only carbon now Feb 27

@ami_angelwings Long gaps between checkpoints. That can be interesting when the game is about resource and risk management, but having to retry long segments in other kinds of games is just annoying.

Doubly so with tanky multistage bosses. I like those in the right context, but most of the time they're just frustrating.

RandomStickman

Feb 27

@ami_angelwings for awhile in the late 2010s it feels like all the pop music have the same drum beat that goes like "🥁~ 🥁~ 🥁🥁~ 🥁🥁~" (if that made sense at all lol). It's such a small beat that I can't really hate it but it feels like all the songs have them.

Null Feb 27

@ami_angelwings

Movies: the cinematic closeup. It’s a fine shot but modern movies are extremely claustrophobic as they often shrink the scene down to a close shot of one or two actors they then hard cut back-and-forth to.

In most media: aggressively gray morality. In bits or pieces it’s fine, but when every single ‘good’ is aggressively paired with evil, it just comes off as lazy and unintentionally nihilistic.

In LNs/Anime/Manga: how 80% of stories will violently twist themselves and their settings to ensure that the protagonist ends up in an academy or highschool. Literal apocalypses could be ongoing, and kids will still be forced to go to highschool.

@NullNowhere I suspect modern movies are doing that because they expect the scenes to be cut to phone screen dimensions for YouTube shorts, I know at least a few movie and television productions have been told to shoot to be clipped for YouTube and Twitter etc, like in the past when widescreen was still new so shows that were shot in 16:9 in anticipation of future widescreen like Babylon 5 still had all their actors crowded on one side of the screen or all in the centre for 4:3 airing

Null Feb 27

@ami_angelwings

The trend in modern movies has been to move as much of the production as possible to post.

So: they keep the shots small and short. Just 1-2 people in frame for short bursts. They shoot it in multiple generic angles. They keep the lighting neutral for digital balancing and editing later. They keep the cameras close so the set can be small.

This gives them a pile of footage that allows them to basically cut the movie together however they want and use a lot of digital editing. The problem is that this style of filmmaking robs the film of a lot of artistic camera and light choices, and overloads the audience with disorienting cuts. It makes it hard for me to watch a lot of movies.

Bernie the Wordsmith Feb 27

@ami_angelwings On fantasy and sci-fi series, the episode in which the characters wake up in a mental institution and all the fucking episode is like "no you did not have superpowers, it was all in your imagination". That was fun the first five times or so but can scriptwriters please stop. The only exception: Stargate Atlantis SE03E06 when Dr. Weir is drawing cards and suddenly all of them are the Stargate Glyphs, marking the shattering of the illusion. Edit: found the timestamp https://youtu.be/ga2_hG-Ur5M?t=178&si=w4FDP_uDuKW5CIWc

startrek atlantis s03e06 the real world part 4

YouTube

Steveg58 Feb 27

@ami_angelwings
I don't play games like this but I've seen game replays and the act of going through a space and looting everything that isn't nailed down and everyone ignoring you just gets on my nerves.
Watching Jingles play Horizon Forbidden West and Aloy vacuums up everything. I can just imagine people in the villages talking:
A: Hey someone has lifted all my tools and supplies.
B: Oh yeah, I saw Aloy come by here earlier. Pity she's such a klepto even if she is the saviour.
A: Well fuck!
B: Take a list of what she stole to the council, they'll reimburse you.

Ariaflame Feb 27

@Steveg58 @ami_angelwings BG3 has some things that you can take without issue, but other things are marked as 'well you could take it, but you would have problems'

Neia masks Feb 27

@ami_angelwings For video games: bloody screen instead of a health bar. The first time, it was neat! For an average game, I want to know how close I actually am to dying.

In writing: when you show the villains talking about something to build tension, but they use vague terms so the author can reveal the specifics later to make it more dramatic. You've got to make that make in-character sense! Rita Repulsa in her moon palace isn't going to ask if Goldar has acquired "it" yet; she's going to be specific. Easy to manage by introducing the name of the macguffin there and hinting at its power. Or by putting the characters in public, somewhere they can't speak freely. The way it's typically used, it doesn't build tension, just annoyance.

lipfang 🏳️‍⚧️Feb 27

@ami_angelwings time travel.

i really like time travel where there is only a single timeline, and that timeline never changes. history is already set in stone, but the time-traveling character was part of the history the while time. i think it takes a lot of creativity and thoughtfulness.

see: Cosmic Princess Kaguya, Kamisama Kiss, Genshin Impact, etc.

but if time travel instead creates an alternate timeline... sorry Doctor Who and Back to the Future! its not even that its confusing (although sometimes it is!), it just feels lazy to me?

maybe i just love single-timeline time travel so much that it gives multi-timeline time travel a bad taste, idk

Kevin Carson Feb 27

@dean @ami_angelwings Tenet

🤖Robot Enby Xero🤖Feb 27

Important communication resolving a problem being interrupted causing problem exacerbation. It's not inherently bad but it's awfully common.

Might edit with more later. Brain fried atm.

Cameron Simpson Feb 27

Alliteration

This actor is always a bad guy

Characters gratuitously not saying the important thing

The “we had no plot so we’re at a party or casino “ episode

Misleading trailers; you want to conceal plot elements - great! You want to abut unrelated dialogue as misdirection? Bah!

SarahGreyWolf Feb 28