(Funny story, I’ve spent half a week trying to get a program to load a file and I have absolutely no idea why it’s failing on this one while everything else works.)
Depends on whether or not choice options can show variables, I guess. I mean, you already know what you’re checking and against what - it’s in the check - so all you’d need to do is write it out. Tedious though, I’ll give you that. (Also horizontal lines are really easy on languages where you’re supposed to draw horizontal lines. Like HTML.)
I had a funny self-inflicted game over where I just spent the entire time boosting my stats to max (fun fact: You can meditate endlessly and push your stats well beyond the 90s), then the second I got up and decided I was gonna hunt down the villain, the world ended. XD
“Alright! Time to take out the bad guy- why is the sea boiling? Why’d the sky turn red? What’s going on?”
I’ve done that depending on what starting story you pick you’ll be significantly younger when you start. Also at the end loop you can just boost your stats to the max before preceding
I really don’t like when you have one of those ‘two opposing trait / skill’ bar and both of them are in no way opposed or mutually exclusive.
Like for exemple one side is diplomacy, the other is stealth, how in the hell are those opposites?
Or in Slammed! with ‘Face’ and ‘Heel’ when realistically speaking, a wrestler will have to be both throughout their career, sometime even if they didn’t want to.
Yeah, but they’re generally one or the other at any given time. Right now, at this moment, are you more of a heel than a face or vice versa? That’s what the stat is measuring.
One thing I dislike is this trend of fiction with absurd premises that makes so many dumb meta jokes to the point where I ask myself, “Hey wait a minute, even the characters in the story think it’s dumb. Why am I still watching/reading this?”
Wish more media with strange premises took thenselves seriously, like in Kinnikuman, where wrestling is serious business and no one questions it.
I definitely prefer things to take themselves seriously. Like, did you not want to make this? Did you have a different idea, but got rejected and/or gave up on it? Cause I can tell
Honestly, I never understood this critique, since the characters aren’t any less developed than their counterparts. If gender roles and gender identity and the like are important aspects to the story than I get it, but if not, there’s no real reason a male character would have to be different than a female version of them all else being the same.
This. It makes sense to have set genders for ROs in the case of, say, the Golden Rose (where the… whatshername, Inquisition lady doesn’t work the same if she were an Inquisition guy) or A Mage Reborn (where the gender of the Book One ROs is societally fundamental), but most CoG worlds make no societal distinctions between genders, and therefore the only thing that set genders does is potentially lock some people out of some ROs.
@Interestedparty How about when the game forces you into a thing - maybe like a sport? - even though it gives you choices to like refuse an invitation?
If it gives you the option to refuse, and then has you do it anyway, that’s pretty bad. Better to not give the option at all than to ignore the choice.
This is bad if it’s a side thing. I HAVE however seen people complain about stuff like “the game is telling me I want to fight monsters, maybe I don’t!” in a game literally about fighting monsters.
I agree with that. It’s negating the player’s agency which at best is annoying, at worst immersion breaking. There was a kazoo analogy that someone put up years ago that fits this well. I mean if you need the MC to play some music for the story to happen, just write that in there, or work around the choices you’ve given to keep the story moving along without doing this:
I’m all for if a plot point is important enough either don’t make it a choice, or get creative later on why the player has to do something they’ve chosen not to for a justifiable story based reason.
That’s a different kettle of fish. If you start reading a game about needing to fight through a dungeon full of monsters as the premise, then it should be pretty obvious from the get go if that will be your cup of tea or not as chances are good you’re not going to be able to negotiate your way through to the prize with every single evil blood thirsty monster there.
I more had my thoughts set on a story that was actually involved in a scandal with bigots so I can’t really say its name without risking being called one as well.
But that story gave you the choice to join a specific sport or not. I chose not to join it but then later in the story something happens and I’m forced to join it just cuz.
I’m (usually) not a fan of characters with a weird array of hax that can warp reality and shit. Never feels like the power they have is earned, either. Plus I can’t really take ‘em seriously when some of them can die from getting shot in the face.
Not sure if it was already mentioned here but it takes me out when the player has little choice in how an RO and the MC treat each other in their romance. Usually in these cases, there’s an assumption of a “dominant” partner or a “man” in the relationship.
I notice this often when MCs pursue someone of the same gender, like when female MCs are assumed to be butch/masculine when they pursue female ROs or when MCs, regardless of gender/gender presentation, are treated like wilting flowers by male ROs. It feels as if these romances warp the MC’s personality to fit the relationship and it can get pretty annoying
I feel like there was a CoG or HG where you initially had the option to refuse to join something, and everybody just kinda sulked about you not joining them, and then like a paragraph later a thing happens that completely screws you up and you end up having no choice BUT to join the group that you said you didn’t want to join.
From how vague I’m being about it, it’s obvious I haven’t played that game in a while, but that might be because I got intensely burned by my choice turning out to be a roundabout way of telling me, “too bad, do it anyways.”
Pretty sure this was the build I was trying to go for in Elden Ring… which would’ve let me take a whole one extra hit before getting horrifically murdered, going by From Software math.
A MC that has no agency of their own and solely exists as a plot device for the “supporting” cast around it. I won’t name any names but it’s honestly not fun at all to go from A to B, trying to do God knows what for XY character so their personal story can resolve and they’re able to move on just to find out the MC is written as a convenient tool, not as their own person. Same applies for reversed roles, the cast just being empty husks that mc treats as a checkbox is probably an instant killer for me, nothing worse than a story where the roles of both the protagonist and it’s npcs aren’t treated equally in depth.
Another thing I cannot stand is railroading. If you tell me I can pick to investigate the cabin or the road and I choose cabin just for you to say ‘Oh cabin you say? We don’t do that here, the road it is.’ then I seriously have to wonder why such a time waster is included in the first place and how many more of those are in the rest of the game. I’d take less choices if it meant they’re meaningful.
And lastly, when the game takes away my choice to decide how the MC is feeling in that moment. Or when the author decides for me how the MC should act in this given moment. I do not care about a set gender for the protagonist, I do not care about their set background but take away the ability for the player to make choices that shape said MC when it matters and I’m instantly dropping the game.
