Anons make the worst game ever

Binary morality system where you can only choose between being a normal person or a mass murdering psychopath. Then your decision has no consequences.
- Dialogue system that gives you 3+ options which change literally nothing
  
  Oh, Bethesda is in this?
  
  All dialogue options have previews that are nothing like what you actually say (Looking at you Cyberpunk) so you try to apologise for someones loss but the actual dialogue is your character being an utter piece of shit without warning. Getting the true ending and several important pieces of gear require you to never be mean to multiple NPCs.
  
  Do you want to die?
  A. No
  B. No way
  C. Definitely not
  And one randomly answers "yes" and you need to restart from a save.
- Or even worse, there's an entire gradient, but what they actually bothered to put in the middle is boring and pointless.
  
  Or there's a viable third option, but it got scrapped 10 minutes before launch and all the text is at complete odds to the dialogue
- Or the tone of the actual responses doesn't match the text for the selection of the responses.
  "Do you accept the mission?"
  Yes
  No, thanks
  Maybe...
  Option 3 actually declares war on quest giver.
  Oh and one that just happened to me last night:
  Your normal actions still work during dialog so if you press buttons to try to exit out of a dialog, you might accidentally attack the NPC you're talking to. If you let them kill you, they are still hostile when you return. Need to start a new save to recover. At least they drop the unique key from their shop when you kill them (Dark Souls 1, hopefully it's no big deal that I had to kill the blacksmith. At least I don't have to listen to the pounding metal when I spawn above him anymore).
  
  In BG3 Lae'zel asked to be with me and she said "if not now, then later" and I said something like "no thanks" and it permanently locked me out of romancing her.
- Fallout 3 lol
- Or just all bad choices.

Although it has a PC version nothing can be configured.
- 30fps
  
  You mean erratically fluctuating 3-30FPS just as the game wants you to go through a jump puzzle that requires precise timing and of course physics calculations are based on display FPS.
  
  Full screen only. Game crashes if you try to exit in any way.
- Ugh the worst. No graphics settings beyond "vysnc" and whether you want a fullscreen or not.

Menus use a virtual mouse cursor even though you're playing with a controller.
- Don't forget you have to hold the button for 5 seconds while an animated circle fills to ensure you are clicking on the button you want to click on.
  
  I want to find the person who decided that was the way. Hold actions are great, if there's ALREADY a press action and you're out of buttons. If there's no press action and I have to hold your button just because, you're bad designers. If you're THAT worried about someone doing something on accident, give me the option to disable it. You don't get to advertise 80 hours of gameplay when 20 of that is holding a button for the UI to work.
  
  Eh. I kinda prefer Hogwarts Legacy doing that rather than asking "are you sure you want to save".
- An every menu has animations for each entry.
- Laughs in Steam Deck touchpad controls

Every single shelf, cupboard, sack, discolored patch of dirt, hollow tree, etc. Is lootable. 99.9% of the loot is useless. The remaining 0.1% is key to solving several quests and/or the best stuff in the game.
- Oh my wife would love this game, that's basically all she likes to do in games. Someone needs to just make thief simulator for her.
  
  Months after Red Dead Redemption came out for the PS3, my friend asked me why I didn't beat it yet. He opened up my inventory and he saw more hunted meat he ever thought someone could accumulate.
  All I did was hunt in the game. It was one of the best hunting games of all time.
  
  https://www.ign.com/articles/thick-as-thieves-first-look-it-takes-the-spirit-of-the-classic-thief-and-makes-it-multiplayer
- The inventory is tetris-style. Lots of items arent squares or rectangles. Items do stack, but you can get them only by selecting and choosing "Take one/Take half/Take X". If you drop something it is GONE.
- That's just an Elder Scrolls game, and I love it, for some reason.
- This did not bother me at all in Skyrim honestly.

Gameplay heavily based on dodging and careful movement, but you can only dodge by double tapping movement keys or the stick
- Wow, my controller just broke on it's own. It was right there on my desk, and then I read your comment, and it snapped itself in half.
  
  At least it was a quick death.
- What was that game? I know I played it, but I can't recall what it was!
  
  With tap-to-move mechanics, I've seen many, but I only recall Terraria having it hardcoded in.
  In that game you can get certain items that allow you to dodge by double-tapping A or D; it just happens that for some reason you may want to slowly move towards a boss, and with a keyboard you can only do so by mashing A or D.
  If you mash too slowly, you're too slow, if you mash too quickly, you ram the boss.
  Also, cliffs range from annoying (in the late game) to deadly (in the early game).

Pointless inventory management and crafting.
- inventory expansion slots only available for ~~purchase~~ rent with real money.
  
  pay to win gacha/lootbox mechanics
- Inventory is limited by item weight.
  Discarding items requires 3+ button presses (per item)
  
  And then they just drop on the ground in front of you and are immediately picked up again as you move the slightest bit.
  
  Ugh I hate games with weighted inventory.
  I like how From Software does it with Souls and Elden Ring, how it measures the weight of what you currently have equipped, and affects how fast you run/roll/etc. Very intuitive, and you don't get punished for picking up too many items.

DLCs out-the-ass Paradox-style.
Escort quests/missions where the NPCs move at a speed between the player's walk speed and run speed.
- The entire game is a series of chained together escort quests through dangerous territories, at awkward speed.
  With extremely frequent pauses so the NPCs can spend 40 seconds fawning over the exact same flower they saw two feet back.
- I don't really have much of an issue with how Paradox does things... Their games are more like game engines that they spend the next 15+ years developing for.
  Also, with each DLC, they put out a (usually massive) free update for everyone who owns the base game. So even if you don't get any DLC, you will end up getting some of the new features for free.
  It is kind of ridiculous that they're still putting out new DLC for EU4... I think it gets absurd after a certain number of DLC.

Everything has durability
- Some items also rot, the rot timer doesn't stop in the unskippable cutscenes and maybe even continues ticking down while you are not playing.
  
  With the result being effectively that almost all provisions you looted yesterday are rotten the next day. The exception being salami, which last a few more days, but eating too much of it makes you take damage after going to the bathroom. You also get a stacking debuff.
  The only way to not have to eat the salami will be to log in within 8 hours of picking up some veggies or something. 8 hour rot timer.
  Further, the only canned food in the game will be decorative unlootable assets. You will notice this and it will annoy you. Especially because there will be a campfire asset used repeatedly in both the world as decoration and in rest stops as an interactable. (As a general crafting station that includes an option to cook meat to reset the 8 hour rot timer, but also has the options to make and repair clothes, etc. Having it be just a cooking station would be too visually appropriate.)
  That campfire asset will always have the same opened half eaten can of beans in the same place with ridiculously detailed modeling of the sheared metal rim, and an equally detailed model of a can opener lying in the dirt next to it. It will seen like an intentional prank. It will be an internal community joke. It will later become clear it was a bought pre-made asset and the developers will seem to not understand why it's funny when the topic is brought up, and will try to use the opportunity to explain the merits of their food system. It will be a confusing, frustrating, and stressful time for the community.
  
  Fun glitch: rot value is unsigned, and once it reaches -1 the item is reborn phoenix-style from the ashes of itself.
  This makes for some interesting mechanics where its worth saving old rusty near-dead items until the end of the game just before a vital boss battle.
  
  the rot timer is calculated based on when the item is picked up using real world time. if you reload a previous save then most likely all of your things are now rotten
  
  even continues ticking down while you are not playing.
  Hmm, I kind of like this idea and could see it working alright if used correctly. Reminds me of Animal Crossing, but so much more annoying.
  
  TIHI
- That, honestly, kept me from enjoying Fallout 3 after being introduced to the series via FO4. I understand that far in the future everything is going to be shitty and broken, but the raiders that just jumped me didn't seem to have any problem getting hits with their useless broken pipe weapons that I can somehow use to repair 5% of the durability of my shitty pipe weapon.
  
  Fallout 3 is a shit game (The classic example of why is that things like stealing a spoon will get you sentenced to death by mob violence) Play Fallout New Vegas, it's built on Fallout 3's engine but instead of being designed and written by indentured interns at Bethesda it was made by people who are, you know, game designers. (I would kill for a NV-esque sequel to F04)
- Ooh! And if you have anything less than 100% durable then the game has a little flashing icon warning you it's not 100%. Couple that with the repair cost being the same regardless of the percentage missing!
  
  Repairing permanently makes the item worse and upgrading it more expensive

Why are they starting with "starting the game"?
They forgot to start with a kernel-level anticheat and a pointless, slow to load "need an account, always online" launcher.
- Connection lost for five entire seconds. Progress dumped, save file deleted, assassins en route.

Equipment can be upgraded, but only through an enormous amount of tedious grind for tiny incremental improvements.
By halfway through the upgrade tree, all the equipment is overpowered and will make any boss fight trivial, including the final boss of the game. All additional upgrades are meaningless.
You don't get to see the real ending unless you fully upgrade all the equipment.
- Upgrading the equipment has a chance to fail and waste all your resources. The chance to fail increases with every level.
  Bonus points: Failing destroys the equipment and you need to start over from scratch.
  
  Ahhh the Ragnarok Online upgrade system! Safe up to… oh god it’s been a while… +7, then the upgrades get much more strong for the next three levels, but with a 50% chance for your weapon to break.
  For armor, it was +4 I believe. I bought an insanely expensive card to make me immune to an element and ended up setting with a +7 coat to put it in after breaking tons of coats.
  
  Wait but I actually like this (without the bonus points part)
  (I do have a system somewhat like that in a game I'm working on in my free time lol)
- There are also four normal endings and a true ending. You can only see the true ending after getting all four normal endings. There are multiple branch points in the story leading to the different endings so you have to start almost from the beginning to find a new one. The true ending is on a wholly separate route that is 99% identical to the one leading to Ending A. There is no new game plus, so you have to start from scratch each time. The true ending boss, unlike the other ending bosses, is absurdly over tuned and the only enemy in the game that requires you use or even know about several obscure mechanics, and even then requires you to have all upgrades maxed out and be near the level cap to even stand a chance.

Driving mechanic where you steer where you look, making it impossible to drive straight while looking around or behind you.
- Halo's gameplay is really not that great (I'd even say pretty bad) without the nostalgia goggles.
  
  I disagree. I'd rather have look-to-steer then the full-left-straight-full-right steering that's in other fps games. Not being able to make slight changes to direction and speed in Half-Life 2 vehicles always made them frustrating.
- I just got triggered

"boost me up"?
- Probably from The Last of Us where you have to help a companion character reach a higher ledge which slows down gameplay.
  
  But... That is a disguised loading screen. The ones everyone complained about as well. The game has to load the data at some point. So either it's completely being removed from the game via a screen or something like "boost me up" or crawling through the caves like in the new God of War.

Huge amounts of foreshadowing, but the story is already very predictable.
Motion controls.
Very long unskippable cutscenes before all bosses.
Hitboxes that make no sense whatsoever.
Voice Actors that really want to be somewhere else. (perhaps with full bladders?)
All cutscenes are slideshows.
A huge open world, with massive Travel distances and no fast travelling, and theres nothing to explore.
- Very long unskippable cutscenes before all bosses.
  It's probably assumed but just to be clear - the save point is before the cutscene, so if you die then you have to watch the cut scene again every time.
  
  The save point is obviously not even directly before the cut scene but before some slow moving platform/elevator jump puzzle you need to navigate by waiting for each of them to be in place that comes before the cut scene.
  
  Also, maybe do what FFXII did to my teenage self, and put a save point between phases of an incredibly difficult, optional boss (I will never again not have multiple saves after that nightmare).
- A huge open world, with massive Travel distances and no fast travelling, and theres nothing to explore.
  But right before the final boss you find out you should've been collecting 100 golden rings from nooks and ledges and now you have to grab a guide and check all 100 locations because there's no way to know which ones you found already.
  
  And at least 2 are only available during a main mission and aren't advertised.
  
  Nah, not 100, that's too convenient a number. Make it something weird like 97 or 143 or whatever non-intuitive option. Have someone hint about 90% in that you'll want "all" the rings, but prior to that final quest, nobody tells you how many there are, so you'll be at 97 searching for the last three and going nuts.
  Of course, the achievement isn't for finding, but for delivering all of them and only triggers when you're handing them over, otherwise you might know ahead of time that you've got them all.

A currency system where the game has a normal currency that you can earn via tasks but that currency is artificially nerfed because there is an additional “premium” currency that is only available either in extremely paltry amounts that have to be saved over months of grinding or spending actual cash. Also there’s a ton of stuff that can only be purchased with large amounts of premium currency
A subscription for basic services like multiplayer or a song catalog even though you just paid $70 for the game
High paced action game that suddenly grinds to a halt for a forced stealth section that was clearly tacked on and poorly designed
- Inventory expansions of the extremely tiny default inventory cost premium currency per month.

Escort Section where the person you're escorting moves at a slower pace than you do, forcing you to jog, walk, jog all the time.
Want to quit the game? Sure go into the menu, click Quit Session -> Are you sure? -> click Yes -> Loading Screen -> Game menu -> click Quit Game -> Are you sure? -> click Yes -> Loading Screen -> Unskippable game title intro -> sub menu with Quit Game, Continue Game, New Game -> click Quit Game -> Are you sure? -> click Yes -> Loading Screen -> Desktop
- I absolutely hate when I can Alt+F4 a game. It is my main way to quit a game.
  
  Do it the Linux way with pkill -9!

escort mission with walk-and-talk exposition dump
keep close to the escort target or the radio will yell at you
faster than walking
slower than running
- Don't forget that you have to stay really close to even hear the exposition dump, but the character is constantly walking through busy areas where you get stuck behind groups of npcs.
  
  You're also in a busy town, so all of those NPCs are having conversations of their own (mindless babble), and their voices and subtitles drown out the shit you're actually supposed to hear.

Lonely? Don't worry, the main character is never going to shut up and will comment on every single thing with lines that won't get old at all.
Yeah, you can play with your friend... After hours of gameplay, once you both have this super special item and only for certain, boring ass missions.
You need an account, and we have no native sign up so we're going to open up a completely different window while you try to drag your mouse awkwardly with the controller. Yes, the cancel button is very close to the confirm, no there's no confirmation, and yes you'll have to start this shit from scratch.
Escort missions, but the escort won't get out of the fucking way, and your shots can kill them.
Currency systems that are just currencies within currencies, within currencies.
The items are easy enough to see, but you have to be in just the right location to pick it up.
There's a save screen, but nothing actually pauses.
I know 99% of games use similar buttons for different functions, but what if we switch it up, just for giggles? Let's make "jump" the R1 button!
You can drive, but it's on ice physics. And, yes, there will be a chase sequence that's going to take you a very, very long time.
- The chase sequence starts with an unskippable cinematic, has no checkpoints, and will force you to rewatch the cinematic every time you fail.
  There's other traffic in the chase sequence, but the traffic is randomized every time, so there's no way to memorize any pattern.
  The mission fails if the target gets too far away.
  Any time you bump into anything, it slows you down enough that the target gets too far away.
  This is also the first time you've driven a car in the game.
  
  And there's an infuriatingly sarcastic fail mesage.
  All you had to do is follow the god damned train, CJ.

Need an account to begin the game even though it’s single player.
After logging in the game updates and requires a restart. Even though you updated outside of the game.
The menu is a convoluted mess with lots of areas all having notification icons.
Lots of DLC with adverts for the DLC menu.
- And of course you need to be always online with that account even though it is single player and all game data is already available locally.

Don't forget a save point right before the unskippable cutscene and overly difficult boss fight, so you get to watch it over again every time you die.
- I still have the “Kairi’s inside me” cutscene from Kingdom Hearts memorized. It has been like two decades since I first played that game, but that cutscene was right before the most difficult story boss in the game.

Rarity tiers but every weapon is the same boring shit.
- Fuck you, now I'm never dropping that fancy old stick with a yellow background that dropped 90 levels ago. Who knows, maybe I'm gonna need it some time?

You guys are forgetting an annoying encumberance system where in order to pick up the heavy object (example: plate mail) you have to drop a light weight object (example: ring) because you are out of item slots.
- Worse: Both encumbrance and grid inventory management. Can’t pick up that plate armor because you need to re-Tetris your inventory around to make room for the 4x6 plate armor icon. And no, you can’t rotate items to make the armor a 6x4 instead.
  And after you organize your entire inventory to fit the armor, you still can’t pick it up because it’s too heavy.

Instead of walking/moving with a your joysticks, you use them to point a fucking mouse cursor and click on the ground where you want to go, like that shitty walking dead game on playstation
- That's just point and click games. I understand the dislike but I think that style of movement works for the style of the game.
  
  That works on PC but I imagine it's shit with a controller.
  I guess there are shitty console ports as well as shitty PC ports then.

MHW was a game desperately in need of a paper manual.
Flashing up pages full of text during the tutorial is flat out obnoxious.
- As someone who started MH with the first PSP game, MH:W was incredibly approachable and easy to learn hahaha
  I played my first PSP MH game and quit after a couple hours, I only really got into it after my best friend brought it up and sherpa’d me into it. It was insanely unapproachable.

If singleplayer:
A complex transmog system that has gacha style of different 'currencies' (shit tier crafting ingredients) and layers of abstraction, some of which functionally require being subbed to a battlepass which allows you to purchase some necessary key items to the transmog process only after you've done all your monotonous dailies for 3 weeks without missing a single one.
If multiplayer:
'Radiant' style quests revolving around escorting a low health, brain dead at path finding npc, which walks slower than your run speed but faster than your walk speed, through a PvP combat zone, who frequently has random mental breakdowns and must be reassured everything will be alright through a 22 step dialog tree process, which is largely randomized everytime, in order to keep them moving.
You and the npc can be killed during conversation segments, which you cannot exit from at whim, you must complete the dialog tree successfully to regain control of your character and exit the 'cinematic dialog' mode.
- Lol that multi-player game actually sounds really interesting....
  I would love to add a gambling mechanic and play it. 11 players in an arena, each player bids 0 to 100 cents to be "it". If you or your stupid NPC dies, you lose and the pot rolls to next round. If you somehow can get your idiotic NPC to the safe zone, you win the entire pot. Pot can grow indefinitely.
  
  Well shit, wasn't expecting that response.
  I have been meaning to try and make a video game, fuck it, maybe that'll be a gamemode if I ever manage to heal my astoundingly fucked up wrist.

The 7 minutes walk and talk segment reminded me of Forza Motorsport 6. A fucking car game with a fucking UNSKIPPABLE, long ass stupid fucking intro nobody asked for.
- Was that the one with the stupid "car launched from plane" bit?
  
  No, it was some bullshit narrator talking about how USA loves cars, how Japan loves cars, how Germans love cars, giving a short rundown of the history of racing or whatever

The tutorial explains things that are exactly the same as every game ever (like moving around, moving the camera, etc) but does not explain or even mention the mechanics that are unique to this game that not even someone who is an expert in every game ever would think about. Then tell the player to do a thing you didn't explain at all how to do.
I swear to fuck, this is the standard for a lot of games these days. I really shouldn't have to look up a guide or wiki to get the fuck out of the tutorial area.

UI is 30 different sections that are marked with obscure pictures instead of words.

Don't forget to never fix game breaking bugs.
30min of gameplay, more purchasable with expensive unbalanced DLC's.
Loot boxes. Because a game is not addictive enough to kids without gambling.
Worst storyline, unrealistic characters.
Add more useless content, like new skins and hats, instead of fixing bugs.
Change mechanics every now and than causing loads of players to loose everything or making expensive purchased items useless.
Make the game subscription based after 6 months, when everyone already bought the base game and extra content, and aren't eligible for refunds anymore.
Make the game pay to win.
Ask EA to publish your game.
Make travel time waaaay to long, no fast travel.
Have way too many collectibles in places which are easy to reach but take a looooong time to get to, with at least 1 per set glitched somewhere impossible to reach.
Did I already say "more DLC's"?
Make multi-player server based, have those servers crash often.
Abandon the project while there's still a massive player base because you're working on the next money-grab piece of junk.
Complain constantly the people leaving bad reviews are just too dumb to understand the concept.
- Don’t forget to never fix game breaking bugs.
  Combined with a single save only mechanic so if you encounter the bug even if it doesn't lead to a crash there is a good chance you have to start over from scratch because your last save game before the bug has been overwritten.
  
  That's a good one.
  I also forgot to add it should have a veeeeery slow and long intro, so the actual horrors of the game should start after 2h of running the game so people aren't eligible for a refund anymore.
  
  Even Fromsoft managed to do this by placing geometry wrong. If you can't get out, can't get killed, and don't have any 'reset to last bonfire' option... this is where you live now.

I feel like I've heard all of these somewhere before...

Oblivion's leveling system lol. Make it both possible to level yourself too much AND not enough! Then make every enemy in the game scale. Make a skill level up as you move and another level up as you jump!

4x type games that don't tell you how values are calculated. "Oh, but there's a wiki!" That's great, but not an excuse.

Wait, is Senua that bad? I was looking forward to playing that one.
- Senua is an incredible experience, but you’ll be disappointed if you go into it expecting deep / challenging combat.
  I’ve heard the same is true about Scorn
- Hellblade is amazing. It's a short bit very cinematic and immersive experience. Playing with headphones is a must, imho.
- Senua is great. The combat felt fine to me, though it definitely wasn't the game's focus.
- It's really good actually, unless you were looking for a different kind of game.
- Play it with headphones! It’s insanely important. I didn’t believe it but I put on headphones after a couple hours and regretted not having started with them. I ran a mixer so my partner and I could both listen.
- It's great, but it's an experience. The combat is fine, but it's how it works with the story that makes it special. Headphones are an absolute must (like, I genuinely think you will be having lesser, less authentic gameplay experience if you're not using headphones). I thought it was a lovely piece of media.

oh no it's ... : FFXIV
and I say that and an enjoyer
- You'll interact with three objects to progress the unvoiced cinematics and you'll like it, or you'll get the trolley again!
- Lol, I just said that to my wife! She's just finished Heavensward, and it took a lot of "seriously it gets better! But also I played through the first hour of the new expansion and fought one mob. Of three low-level trash creatures. So... but it's good! Really!"

30 minute cutscene that dumps a lot of exposition and it ends with a timeskip into the tutorial.

The last one is Starfield in a nutshell

Have to make permanent choices early on. Get poor, half-assed introduction into lore that is way overcomplicated.
Just like real life.

Every mission is like this one from GTA:VC. Easy to fail, frustrating controls, annoying camera, long, unskippable intro and you can't save during it. Add minute-long loading times and it's perfect.

progressing through dialogues is achieved with ever-changing buttons (and combos?) displayed on screen, but in an ever-changing location.
- And every QTE is Press X To Not Die.
  There are a dozen per cutscene.
- With buttons on screen that change position based on the length of the dialog line

There's a skip button in every cinematic but it does nothing.
- They run a click-powered miner under the hood, transforming your anger into ad clicks.

As someone who hates souls games, make sure there are undodgeable attacks by enemies. Example, you’re walking past a wall and something attacks and kills you from behind. Also, make sure there are huge bosses with ambiguous hit boxes and indeterminable strike locations so dodging is weird and dumb.

Mind you, Monster Hunter World forces every player of a hunting squad to view an unskippable story mission cutscene in their own hosted instance before being able to join another player's session of the same mission.
Lots of watching the cutscene in a solo hunt, abandoning the mission, then joining on a friend.

Choices once made (purchasing armor) cannot be undone later. Buy a half-assed weapon in round 1, fill that slot forever and never be able to throw it away later.

Game is not open-source.

You have to spend your earned money after every round. You cannot save it to learn what skills you actually need and then bulk-buy later.

Does not run fluently on a modern computer in 2024.

Requires internet connectivity even though single-player.

Earned levels increase your character's size permanently. As your character grows, it can no longer sneak into small tunnels to catch precious loot.

Enemies get way harder as you progress through the game and upgrade your weapons, making all these upgrades essentially useless.

When you die you have to re-start from the beginning. From the very beginning.

Please stop trying to normalize the stupid QAnon frog.
- Fuck that. Those losers don't get Pepe!

Main companion is "non-binary"
- Why would that make the game worse, unless you're a bigot?
- Real life must be unbearable for you. Awww.
- What game were you referring to with this