Video games are fun. It’s why we play them; well, that and for the chicks. But there are some things that video game developers insist on putting in almost every game, things that nobody likes, things that make us want to give up this rock ‘n roll lifestyle altogether.

Why do they do it? Maybe they’ve gotten so used to it they’ve forgotten everyone hates it; maybe they want to make a ton of money easily; or maybe they’re just lazy.

Whatever the reason, they keep rearing their ugly heads again and again. These are my top five repeat offenders.

It begins

Boring Quests

I am an avid gamer – an avid PC gamer no less – and I haven’t spent more than an hour on World of Warcraft – the online RPG that has been claiming PC gamer souls for over 6 years, leaving a path of destroyed relationships, empty wallets and poor hygiene in its mammoth wake has left me unscathed.

It’s not like I didn’t try. A few years ago I decided to finally cave and see what all the fuss was about; it is, after all, kind of a big deal. So I setup an account; logged in; waded through a bunch of character descriptions to see what suited me best; spent a few minutes making my character look as stupid as possible and entered the World of Warcraft  for the first time (and, contrary to my expectations, the last).

I wandered around having some boring conversations with the villagers until I found the person who could give me my first quest. It was to kill 9 wolves and fetch their skins for him. Perhaps seeing I was a bit non-plussed, he spun me some sob story about why he needed them, but I know when I’m being taken for a ride.

Whatever, I needed the experience anyway. So I wandered into a random cave/forest and meandered around waiting for stray wolves to attack. After slaughtering nine of them, I went back proudly bearing the spoils of war, cautiously avoiding the pockets of PETA protestors that had started to form.

Upon my arrival, he said thanks, and gave me my next quest: kill 6 bears. I immediately logged out, uninstalled the game, and have never looked back since.
I get it – the game is a grind, the quests get more exciting, whatever – I don’t care. The fact is we’ve seen this kind of lazy design over and over in these kinds of games.

How many times have you spent the first twenty minutes of an RPG feeling like an errand boy, running around town delivering messages or fetching items.

In the WoW quest, it would be so easy for the game to tell a story of a nearby pack of wolves that had been terrorizing the town and eating the children, and someone’s baby was still alive but being kept in their den. So then I have to go in there and clear out the cave, kill one “boss wolf” and bring back the baby and feel like a hero.

Instead I’m just killing random wolves that are probably randomly generated, and was so bored that I literally couldn’t bring myself to do the second quest.  A game should be fun from beginning to end; I don’t want to feel like I’m doing work when I’m trying to relax.

I’m flirting with that other elf because he’s level 65. He must have killed thousands of wolves.

Clone Wars

Have you ever played an FPS and felt like you’d played it before? It’s not a glitch in The Matrix – it’s just another game with developers that have taken more than a little inspiration from a hit title in the same genre (let’s face it, probably Call of Duty).

Think quick – how many FPSs have you played that were set in one of the World Wars, or the Vietnam War. That’s because a long time ago, game developers decided we most liked shooting people with dusty, bolt-action rifles and prop planes. We like our wars gritty and technologically inferior, we like killing Germans and Russians in trenches and crawling under barbed wire. Right?

Well, not exactly. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare took the wartime FPS in a totally different direction, and in doing so made the franchise the wrecking ball it is today. Everything about the game was fresh and innovative, and appreciation of this was reflected in sales. Activision then followed this up with World at War, a return to World War II, and gamers were less than happy about it.

Of course now we’ll be (and already are) inundated with futuristic war games and those in-game sequences Modern Warfare popularized until the point where we’re clamouring to stare through some iron sights again.

They could at least make their posters look different.

Comatose NPCs

Now admittedly I know very little about the actual coding of a game, but surely something can be done about this. In games such as Half-life, NPCs serve significant roles in telling the story and keeping the pace of the game, and Valve has made all attempts to give them character depth and emotion.

Why then, do they maintain their slow, steady stride and conversational tone when the savior of the human race is bounding up and down the room and hopping on the furniture like an orangutan on day 3 of a cocaine binge? An orangutan, mind you, that occasionally climbs off that expensive-looking switchboard long enough to beat you repeatedly in the face with a crowbar.

We’ve seen games make attempts at this, like NPCs that will attack you if provoked (I learned this the hard way in Skyrim when I slaughtered someone’s pet chicken), or Call of Duty games where you just straight up lose the game for shooting your CO, which seems fair. Just once, however, I’d like to hear Barney say, “Gordon. Gordon! Damnit Gordon, could you get the hell down from there?”

Look at that stone wall. Man, this guy would kill at the poker table.

Unskippable cutscenes

Now this needs some qualification. I don’t hate watching cutscenes – in fact, 90% of the time I wouldn’t skip a cutscene if I’m seeing it for the first time.

The problem is the one they put right before a big boss fight. Where you can’t save. Everytime you die, you’re going to have to sit through that same cutscene before you get your face stomped again. There’s a certain measure of horror that creeps in when the boss fight isn’t going your way and you know you’re going to have to sit through that damn cutscene again. The same thing applies when you’re playing through a game for the second time – must you really sit and watch them all again?

I get it though, really I do. You spend weeks working on something and someone yawns and hits space bar. James Cameron never had to put up with this. Well you, sir, are not James Cameron, and if we could have skipped Titanic to the part where everyone starts falling off the ship we’d probably all think it’s a better movie anyway.

Admittedly, someone getting falcon-punched is always worth watching

Protect the Idiot

I’m not sure there’s a single person left in the world who actually enjoys escort missions, as the three we know of who did were rooted out and killed for opposing the will of the people. And yet, somehow, games consistently put these in, as if it’s something you just have to endure, like brushing your teeth and eating vegetables.

These could actually be fun, if the NPC you’ve been tasked with escorting hadn’t lost his family, home and reproductive organs all on the same day, and decided life really wasn’t worth it anyway. How else can you explain his desire to wander aimlessly into the street in the midst of arcing grenades and automatic weapon fire. In all these missions your NPC invariably gets himself killed, usually through no fault of your own.

It’s bad enough you have to take out 37 henchmen by yourself, but you have to do it before they manage to shoot the idiot standing in the open looking like he just woke up with a hangover.

"Try not to d-hey! WHERE ARE YOU GOING? THERE ARE ZOM- dammit."