I''m not speaking of blatant bugs; nor gameplay-related stuff. But little things that were poorly, very poorly designed, like in a user interface. I''ll start: Enemy Territory: - my resolution settings are sometimes automatically randomly reverted back from 1024x768x32 to 800x600x16 without appearant reason. - when you refresh the servers, the list is gradually filled with games; but your currently selected game is always the same from the beginning of the list, so it''s very hard to select one until the refresh is finished (how many times did i join a game i didn''t want ?). Return to Castle Wofenstein: - (didn''t play for a while but i seem to remember the CD key settings sometimes randomly disappeared. You had to play with the CD key next to you.. just in case of you''d need to fill it back. Republic: The revolution: - the whole user interface is a mess. But kuddos to the clock. It seems like the position of the mouse on screen, for no reason and without any visible hint, enables or disables the fast clock ? Frozen Throne: - my recent language versions problem; bought a Warcraft 3 English and a Frozen Throne French. Bad idea. Doesn''t even want to install, due to a "language conflict". Y.

Well, you know how the English and French feel about each other in real life... Just be glad that you weren''t trying to install an Irish expansion on an English original!

Things I hate:

- Intros and cutscenes that you can''t skip. I like watching them the first time around, after that, who cares.

- Unsortable columns in sports games. Sports games in general need a lot of work. Most games have decent gameplay, but outside of the actual game, they''re not too good. All sports should have things like extensive records books and and sortable and better detailed statistics.

- Non-customizable controls

- Imbalance in any game where you get to pick a race/class. These include strat games and rpgs alike.

Hmm, there are many more, but those are off the top of my head.

moonshot aka Jayson Bailey

Intros and cutscenes that you can''t skip is my number one right now, anyone playing SWG probably feals the same way... (Three 10 second unanimated, non-skippable intros!).

another thing im not too fond of is games that make you pick a path that makes you wonder if the path you picked is the best path, and what are you missing on the other path.

games that are released unpolished. By polished I mean removing all obvious, common bugs, these usually including clipping problems in 3D games.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

I have a lot of pet peeves but probably my biggest is lack of any automated patching in games today. I mean, come on - the Internet is how old now? Nine times out of ten a gamer is going to have an Internet connection of some sort. The friggin pr0n mongers can figure out how to put little trojans and all kinds of other shit on my machine without me knowing, why is it that I need to go manually download a patch for Battlefield 1942?

After reading a bit about Valve''s Steam system, I must admit that I''m intrigued. A distributed filesystem is an ingenious way to handle file patching. Kudos to the Valve guys.

I''d like to add "horrible controls customization", which isn''t nearly as bad as no customization at all but still quite bad. You know what I''m talking about - huge list of controls with non-obvious names in no order, changing some control to an already used key just clears the control the key was originally assigned to, sometimes pressing ''esc'' just destroys every change you made and returns to the previous menu, etc. There are good systems, too - controls are categorized, and key conflicts are shown in a nice list so they can be easily resolved.

If somebody could, I think it would be a good idea to compile everything added here into one big list and then submit it to gamedev.

Anyways things I hate...

-Imbalanced races etc ( I know this is unavoidable )
-Complex UI's
-UI's with pictures and delayed balloon popup helper thingys ( :-P )
-Not a wide enough variety in RTS's (all units are pretty well the same for each race, ground attack meele, ground attack air attack range, seige etc)


Edit: FranG I just saw your post about Steam, Steam is not the best, it is VERY slow...it eats system resources like a B**** and is set to automatically start up when you start your computer (easy to change)...

[edited by - maxd gaming on September 9, 2003 7:25:19 PM]

maxd gaming: Interesting point about steam. I haven''t tried it yet myself. I use distributed filesystems constantly at work (AFS) and they are amazing when they work right. Then again, I''ve been told that distributed filsystems are one of the hardest things to get right, so maybe I''m not surprised.

quote:

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Original post by maxd gaming
-Imbalanced races etc ( I know this is unavoidable )
...
-Not a wide enough variety in RTS''s (all units are pretty well the same for each race, ground attack meele, ground attack air attack range, seige etc)

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Don''t mean to be pedantic, but aren''t these gameplay things?

My pet hates:
- limited number of save files, esp. in RPG. If possible, I''d like to be able to create directories/folders, sort and organise my save files.
- In installation, no control on where in the (Windows) Start menu to put shortcuts. I like to keep all the game icons placed in the "Games" folder.
- Stupid shortcuts/icons dumped on the desktop by installation, eg. shortcut to web pages, registration, demos etc.