What about the things that no gamer in history has ever asked for, but that the game developers kindly inflicted, sorry, gifted upon us?
For example:
- Unskippable cutscenes (seriously, who thought this would be appreciated by people paying good money to play the games?),
- Unskippable cutscenes (again, yes, but this is a much worse example) which occur before a boss-fight or difficult battle, so when you die (repeatedly) you then have to sit through the quickly becoming monotonous cut-scene just to get to action.
- The game mechanic whereby you have to keep pressing a key or button (on your keyboard or joypad) to simulate the effort of forcing opening a door or a window, or lifting a heavy object, etc,
- A weapon carrying limit in first and third person shooters that are NOT trying to pretend that they are ultra-realistic simulations of real-world combat,
- The game mechanic whereby the screen turns red when you are injured, making it harder to see the enemies or anything. The game 'Control' seems almost like it is doing this ironically, because in that game the enemies are mostly red, so the more injured your in-game character becomes, the harder it is to actually see the enemies you are fighting. A genius bit of design, that is 😮(
- Locking higher game difficulty levels, so that, say, the player has to first complete the game on 'Hard' mode before they can play the even harder 'Nightmare' mode. This is wrong because (a) the player should be able to play on whatever skill level he/she chooses, even if the game is new to them, and (b) what about the times when the player has played the game many times, and is an expert at it, but because they are now reinstalling the game from scratch again (and so there is no save-game or whatever on the PC/console that says "The game has been completed on a lower skill level, so now Nightmare difficulty is unlocked") then the player will have to complete the game on a lower skill level instead of just starting on the highest skill level as they would prefer.
And not the same type of problem, but:
- Why, in so many third person games, does your character continue to move their legs and run on the spot when they are moved into a wall or obstruction? It just screams lazy design, and reminds you that it's just a game.
- Why, in (again) so many third person games, is swimming so awkward? You want to swim up or down, but end up turning around heading downwards as the game gets confused. This never happens in first person games (that I remember), but it's quite common in third person games.
And on a more personal note, I wish more games had mirrors and weather effects. Mirrors can remind you of the character that you are playing, and rain or snow can (to me) really liven up a scene, and add to the atmosphere and feel of the game. I also used to hate it when games didn't have cutscenes (my hearing isn't too good) or an option to invert the Y-axis, but thankfully those two omissions are far less common nowadays.