Ugggggghhh!

I was so relieved to finish the last trophy in Avengers at the 82-hour mark. Actually, I really started to like Avengers when I reclassified it from a brawler to a Looter RPG. Also helpful was the DualSense feedback that really puts impact into all your donks, dings, TONGS and BOooorNGS. So instead of comparing it to the perfect Streets of Rage 4, I started to think about how this game was such a wildly different take on Diablo 3, with 7 heroes who feel very distinct from one another to play. The Endgame (see what I did there?) content I spent 2/3rds of the play time doing was particularly frustrating at higher levels, as the game never got truly easy; instead, you have enemies that kill you in one hit. So the experience of beating Marvel's Avengers brought to the surface a list of rants I have about games. Hydrate yourselves, cause there's a wave of salt coming!

You want me to spend 15 hours on this same mission?

Grindy trophies. Look, I already bought your game, so I'm into it. In Avengers, I had to grind 50 Hives, which is about 17 hours of the longest type of mission. This loop doesn't make me buy any DLC, as there is no way to spend money to shorten this. Crystal Dynamics could have made their stupid point AND respected the hunter at 20 missions. There are many trophies like this that are just the developer trolling trophy hunters. I'm looking at you too, Death Stranding (100hrs past the story to max out all facilities). The interesting thing is the games that know they're good, games that I'd actually want to put more hours into, often don't have asinine grinds like this. Doom Eternal had you play (not win) 25 multiplayer matches and earn 200 kills. This is all less than 10 hours, and I enjoyed it well beyond the trophies. Hell, Undertale's platinum doesn't even require you to beat the game!

Along the lines of grindy trophy is a flood of tasks. The Assassins Creed games have these gigantic maps with almost 1000 tasks, only 1/10th of which are necessary and even less are necessary. I think I understand the intention is to be rewarded with tasks and gameplay for exploration, but a smaller map and half the tasks is still a huge undertaking. Maybe that extra time can be used making the playable content more stable? Also, I hate fishing. I don't know if it's more or less interesting than fishing in real life, but it definitely sucks in games.

For every dope easter egg item like this, there are 100 lame missions

This is usually paired with being a sandbox nonlinear game. This genre is tired. For every Horizon Zero Dawn or Ghost of Tsushima, there are 98 Assassin's Creeds or Farcrys that are eating up the Playstation Store instead of titles that are more nuanced and deserving of your time, like Dandara.

Dandara is a must-play. I will plug it every chance I get.

Nothing to lose by allowing people to play like this

Screw your lack of customized controls. This is my least favorite trend of console games and is a massive hindrance to accessibility. I appreciate that the developers have a tested set of idealized controls and to be fair, I don't change them 90% of the time. It's actually great that the industry has agreed that in shooters, L2 aims down sights and R2 fires. However, outside of this genre, it's the Wild friggin' West. Ubisoft insists on using R1 to attack and the triggers are then wasted on some other shit. Yes, I can remap buttons in the system settings, but I'll need split screen to know what exactly I'm changing. If I have to click the thumbstick to sprint every 5 seconds in another game, I'm going to break my DualSense. If I can't change the sprint button, allow me to auto-sprint like Apex Legends or Returnal. As accessibility expands this particular generation, I hope customized controls fall under that umbrella and become a standard as well.

Hold the attack button? Really?

At the same time, I am really over the multipurpose buttons. In Avengers, the interact button is...wait for it...the attack button. This is endemic to gaming and needs to be stopped. Trying to push a switch? Nah, you'll do the long-press attack instead. In Final Fantasy XV, it was jumping in place instead of opening doors. Some games will make you line up the camera with the objective. Ugh. In Apex Legends, reload is the same as interact. Trying to run in and pick up your dead teammate's banner in the middle of a firefight when a quarter second makes all the difference? Developers can't see all conditions of their gameplay, but customized controls can do that work for them.

This is specific to Overwatch, but the individual character adjustments they do every other week are related to professional PC players, and screw you if you're a console player. I understand that Blizzard needs a baseline to make adjustments and professionals would have a flatter range of (high) ability than the remaining 99.99% of players, but it's also super annoying. If you picked this game up in May of 2016 like I did, you were used to Soldier 76 having a steady stream of fire with a tight spread. Well, 4 years into this game's life cycle, his gun now recoils and you have to re-learn how to play him. Why? He was getting slightly-too-high win or lose rates based on some other character changes, so Blizzard changed him fundamentally. Previous to that, they would change bullet and drop-off damage. Now, I'm used to recoil in Call of Duty and Apex Legends, but I've spent four years internalizing a decent amount of Overwatch's gameplay and this is traumatic.

I think that's it for now. What features annoy you in games?