Biggest turn-offs for a game?

Glitches? Art style? Graphics? Or simply a genre? What's the one thing that when reading a review or watching gameplay will almost instantly turn you away from buying it?

Mine would, sadly, be art style. If the game looks cheesy, I won't buy it. I simply don't want to look at big headed characters or overly dramatic features. After watching the first Dishonored trailer I was very excited, however later on my brother showed me the first uploaded pictures of the in-game characters and I literally said, "Well I'm not paying for it." Don't get me wrong, I love artistic touches in video games. The Walking Dead, Soul Caibur, No More Heroes, Mirror's Edge, Mario games, RPG's, Limbo, Minecraft, etc. All are great games, and not only do they have strong artistic aproaches to them, the art actually adds to the setting and makes the experience even better. Dishonored however... after seeing such an amazing looking trailer that looked like a mixture of an art style and realism, it was so disappointing to see it change so much. I'm still looking forward to playing it and I'm sure I will enjoy it, but I won't be paying for it. I'll borrow it or play my brother's copy if he gets it.

When a game autosaves before a lengthy cutscene, exposition dump, or segement where you do nothing but walk, and then a massive battle occured, so every time you died you had to rewatch the cutscene or exposition dump. This happened a lot in Gears of War and I think the most annoying part was before the the final boss battle where you respawned in the train car and had to re-pick up all your weapons, that got tedious and annoying as **** after the third time you died.

Also the "Dark/Gritty/Realistic" artstyle is really overstaying its welcome. What happened to colour? It is part of the reason why I enjoyed Halo was because it was full of bright colours yet stilll serious in tone.

A story that is "Dark and gritty." Too many times it just comes off as fake. Worse is that they use the "dark and gritty" as more of a gimick.

Quick time events in the middle of a battle, where if you fail you die, THEN get penalized for the death at the end of the level. Example of this would be Bayonetta. I still love the game but the QTE's were dumb.

Others include stupid party AI, artificial difficulty, repetitive and boring gameplay, and unskippable cutscenes. Goes 10 fold for the last one if the story, characters, and voice acting is awful.

Also agree with the "dark and gritty" artsyle as well. I prefer something with at least a little color (like Persona 4 and Borderlands)

They aren't always deal breakers for me but they're bothersome. :?

When a game autosaves before a lengthy cutscene, exposition dump, or segement where you do nothing but walk, and then a massive battle occured, so every time you died you had to rewatch the cutscene or exposition dump. This happened a lot in Gears of War and I think the most annoying part was before the the final boss battle where you respawned in the train car and had to re-pick up all your weapons, that got tedious and annoying as **** after the third time you died.

Also the "Dark/Gritty/Realistic" artstyle is really overstaying its welcome. What happened to colour? It is part of the reason why I enjoyed Halo was because it was full of bright colours yet stilll serious in tone.

DarkGamer007

Yeah bad autosaves are a total pain. Playing GTA Vice City on my iPod and they don't exist lol GTA has actually had bad autosaves in every one I've played :/. And Halo is definitely a good example of art style done right. You can tell exactly what kind of ship you're on by looking at the floor or just a foot of wall. Also the weapons are beautifully made (how they came up with and animated some of the Forerunner reloads is beyond me).

Another thing this reminded me of is not being able to skip through conversation that you already heard. I adored the Walking Dead game with all of my heart, but there was nothing more annoying than listening to a long conversation twice because you clicked the wrong number button.

Quick time events in the middle of a battle, where if you fail you die, THEN get penalized for the death at the end of the level. Example of this would be Bayonetta. I still love the game but the QTE's were dumb.

Others include stupid party AI, artificial difficulty, repetitive and boring gameplay, and unskippable cutscenes. Goes 10 fold for the last one if the story, characters, and voice acting is awful.

They aren't always deal breakers for me but they're bothersome. :?

Lucky_Krystal

Loveeeeeed Bayonetta :D. RE6 was a pretty good example of what not to do with QTE's (still enjoyed it though). Bad voice acting is another major issue with some games today. I've seen some indie games have better voice actors than some of the major games. Mass Effect, (again) Walking Dead, Resident Evil (the recent ones!), and Battlefield 3 all have very good voice acting (and there's quite a few more)

Two more HUGE turn-offs:

When a game switches genre (looking at RE6 again). I just pray Dead Space doesn't fall..

Unessessary multiplayer. One of the worst issues to date.

Games that are all about quick reflexes and little about thinking like those music games that is mostly just QTE or fighting games. This is not all games that need quick reflexes. For example I find there is a good amout of thinking in the current FPS. I like how FPS force you to quickly thinking.

Constant hand holding throughout the game. If I'm having trouble solving a puzzle or difficult section, I don't want pop ups asking me if I want to skip the section or "why don't you try over here ->".

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In game tutorials for games that require little to no help. If you can't figure out what button is to jump or run, you have bigger issues. I thought that's why they include a manual in the case instead of wasting plenty of game time teaching me how to open doors or crouch.

I can not stand Idnie games that claim it is more that what it is.

Boring collecting/gathering/killing quests. "Kill X amount of these, gather Y of these, return to me, rinse and repeat for different monsters and different objects, come back to me." I really cannot stand to bear that style of gameplay anymore and if games have too much of that, I usually get bored right away and never touch the game again. A couple of them are okay, but i hate it when games overdo it.

Poor characters. If I find the characters annoying, if I can't relate to them or if they overall lack charisma and distinction, I get turned off the game easily.

Quick time events in the middle of a battle, where if you fail you die, THEN get penalized for the death at the end of the level. Example of this would be Bayonetta. I still love the game but the QTE's were dumb.

Others include stupid party AI, artificial difficulty, repetitive and boring gameplay, and unskippable cutscenes. Goes 10 fold for the last one if the story, characters, and voice acting is awful.

Also agree with the "dark and gritty" artsyle as well. I prefer something with at least a little color (like Persona 4 and Borderlands)

They aren't always deal breakers for me but they're bothersome. :?

Lucky_Krystal

Probably the technical side of a game, most notably a game's framerate. It's an area within every game that has to be good, otherwise the immersion is almost certainly broken once or twice.

A big turn-off for me is when a game has objectives that start to feel like chores. For example in Far Cry 2 when you had to remember to take malaria pills, that was such a dumb mechanic and also in RPG's when the grind is blatant and not mixed in different gameplay elements.

You walk forward 5 paces- the game snatches control away from you for a boring,unnecessary cut scene. You open a door- the game snatches control away from you for a boring,unnecessary cut scene. You exit the building- the game snatches control away from you for a boring,unnecessary cut scene. These devs need a goddamn slap. I wish they would make more of an attempt to tell the story as you're actually playing- less like RE6, more like Dead Space.

Checkpoints before cut scenes before a difficult segment. Max Payne 3's cut scenes come to mind as some can't be skipped when they're masking load times- I would honestly prefer a load screen over sitting through the same dialogue again and again. Anything easy/tedious sandwiched between the checkpoint and the difficult part is a turn-off. Utterly mysterious how playtesting allows this.

Outside of God of War, QTE's. Evil, evil annoying things.

Also, gamers thank acts as if pretending is the same thing as a RPG. This hurt the RPG system of the game so much.

Bad voice acting.

Strategy games.

Everyone else just seems to drool and love over them but I just can't get into any of them (with the exception of tower defense games and very few turn-based strategy games). I don't know, I'm just more of a FPS/Action oriented gamer than the slow tactical pace that strategy games go for.

1. First Person view, if there is no 3rd person view option the game is immediately no buy for me. I don't like limited cone view.
2. Vague, misleading, unclear dialog choice and the one that leads to one ending or several endings without significant outcome.
3. Poor story telling or unclear objective.
4. Dark and muted color as dominant color palette.
5. Excessive blood and gore.
6. MMS (modern military shooter). This has point 1, 3, 4 and military jargon which I don't care about.

Strategy games.

Everyone else just seems to drool and love over them but I just can't get into any of them (with the exception of tower defense games and very few turn-based strategy games). I don't know, I'm just more of a FPS/Action oriented gamer than the slow tactical pace that strategy games go for.

Goyoshi12

Boss fights and other challenges that amount to a timed, button-mashing hand-eye coordination test. They are unimaginative and tedious. The melee fights in Sleeping Dogs are among the worst of this type of fighting, where your controls are temporarily locked out if the timing isn't exact. The opposite of that is Batman: Arkham Assylum, where the melee fighting is fluid and uninterrupted and skill and strategy are far more important than mere button mashing on cue.

Framerate drops, its far to common. I would rather them tone down the graphics to fix the framerate if they have to.

Stupid AI. It can really break immersion for me. I'll use Halo 4 as an example. While I love the game, and I was really getting into it, the AI could be really dumb at times. I could be in the middle of a firefight, then I move, take cover, reload, expecting the enemy to chase after me. What happens? I peak around the corner, and the enemy is acting as if I wasn't even there. Not only that, they like to shoot corpses, a lot. I had one part where I was driving a warthog with a marine on the gun. I saw him shoot and kill an enemy, then continue to shoot the enemy's body while another enemy was shooting at us. Brilliant.

Unskippable cutscenes. It's a minor complaint, really, but sometimes I like to start new characters just to play them out and get a feel for them. When I'm doing that, I don't wanna have to watch a long cutscene just so I can play. I just wanna test the character. The most recent issue I had with this was Mass Effect eand Skyrim. Both had fairly lengthy intros that you can't exactly skip. (You can skip some dialogue in ME3)

Dull, boring characters. Perhaps my biggest complaint. If you can't add interesting characters to your story, then it gets boring very quick. It's one of the reasons I have such a hard time getting into Skyrim. I would rather have a character that I despise because he's such a fiend than have these carboard cutouts people like to call characters.

Forgettable soundtracks. One big thing for me is the music. If the game has a dull soundtrack, it's difficult to get into. While I love Hans Zimmer and the music he does, I felt the music he did in the MW games was just boring in comparison to his other works. Another soundtrack I didn't enjoy too much was Halo 4's soundtrack. There was really only one song that I could really remember. Also, bad placement of music in certain areas can be a real turn-off. Like Skyrim's attempt at creating an epic score while I fight a mudcrab. Doesn't really do it for me, Bethesda.

Tedious sidequests. Gathering quests, killing quests, and go from point A to point B quests. Most are just boring, and feel like chores as opposed to making any sort of progress. It's one of the main reasons I stopped playing World of Warcraft.

Strategy games.

Everyone else just seems to drool and love over them but I just can't get into any of them (with the exception of tower defense games and very few turn-based strategy games). I don't know, I'm just more of a FPS/Action oriented gamer than the slow tactical pace that strategy games go for.

Goyoshi12

If you like tower defense games, Sanctum off of Steam is a great (very challenging!) game. I bought it for only $2.50 and I'm sure it'll go on sale again for the holidays

Another bad thing left out in most games today is the lack of split screen. Before I had high speed internet (and still even with high speed internet), if a game does not have a splitscreen option I'm likely to skip it.

[QUOTE="Goyoshi12"]

Strategy games.

Everyone else just seems to drool and love over them but I just can't get into any of them (with the exception of tower defense games and very few turn-based strategy games). I don't know, I'm just more of a FPS/Action oriented gamer than the slow tactical pace that strategy games go for.

Oozyrat

If you like tower defense games, Sanctum off of Steam is a great (very challenging!) game. I bought it for only $2.50 and I'm sure it'll go on sale again for the holidays

Oh yeah, played a lot of that game.

It is fvcking awesome.

Stupid AI. It can really break immersion for me. I'll use Halo 4 as an example. While I love the game, and I was really getting into it, the AI could be really dumb at times. I could be in the middle of a firefight, then I move, take cover, reload, expecting the enemy to chase after me. What happens? I peak around the corner, and the enemy is acting as if I wasn't even there. Not only that, they like to shoot corpses, a lot. I had one part where I was driving a warthog with a marine on the gun. I saw him shoot and kill an enemy, then continue to shoot the enemy's body while another enemy was shooting at us. Brilliant.

Unskippable cutscenes. It's a minor complaint, really, but sometimes I like to start new characters just to play them out and get a feel for them. When I'm doing that, I don't wanna have to watch a long cutscene just so I can play. I just wanna test the character. The most recent issue I had with this was Mass Effect eand Skyrim. Both had fairly lengthy intros that you can't exactly skip. (You can skip some dialogue in ME3)

Dull, boring characters. Perhaps my biggest complaint. If you can't add interesting characters to your story, then it gets boring very quick. It's one of the reasons I have such a hard time getting into Skyrim. I would rather have a character that I despise because he's such a fiend than have these carboard cutouts people like to call characters.

Forgettable soundtracks. One big thing for me is the music. If the game has a dull soundtrack, it's difficult to get into. While I love Hans Zimmer and the music he does, I felt the music he did in the MW games was just boring in comparison to his other works. Another soundtrack I didn't enjoy too much was Halo 4's soundtrack. There was really only one song that I could really remember. Also, bad placement of music in certain areas can be a real turn-off. Like Skyrim's attempt at creating an epic score while I fight a mudcrab. Doesn't really do it for me, Bethesda.

Tedious sidequests. Gathering quests, killing quests, and go from point A to point B quests. Most are just boring, and feel like chores as opposed to making any sort of progress. It's one of the main reasons I stopped playing World of Warcraft.

Daizengar

gee wiz batman! thats alil harsh, and i suppose you can't name a game that doesn't have those issues.Lulekani

Maybe, but there are games that have fewer of these issues than others. Example, the classic Unreal Tournament. The bots could be challenging, it had an awesome soundtrack, no insanely priced DLC, and it was all good fun. The only real negative thing about it was the lack of a decent single player.

Another game I really enjoyed with only a few of these issues was Hitman: Blood Money. There were a few cutscenes that were unskippable, but most of those were very short, and were only really dialogue. The AI could be questionable at times, sure, but weren't quite as dumb as other games. The soundtrack was fairly good, and I love the work that Jesper Kyd does. Most missions felt really unique, and were more of a test of patience, and not quite as tedious. While there was little character interaction within the game, most of your targets had a fairly interesting backstory that you could choose to read about.\

I'm told Far Cry 3 has an excellent soundtrack, amazing characters, fairly decent AI, and most of the gathering quests are more fun.

[QUOTE="Lulekani"]gee wiz batman! thats alil harsh, and i suppose you can't name a game that doesn't have those issues.Daizengar

Maybe, but there are games that have fewer of these issues than others. Example, the classic Unreal Tournament. The bots could be challenging, it had an awesome soundtrack, no insanely priced DLC, and it was all good fun. The only real negative thing about it was the lack of a decent single player.

Another game I really enjoyed with only a few of these issues was Hitman: Blood Money. There were a few cutscenes that were unskippable, but most of those were very short, and were only really dialogue. The AI could be questionable at times, sure, but weren't quite as dumb as other games. The soundtrack was fairly good, and I love the work that Jesper Kyd does. Most missions felt really unique, and were more of a test of patience, and not quite as tedious. While there was little character interaction within the game, most of your targets had a fairly interesting backstory that you could choose to read about.\

I'm told Far Cry 3 has an excellent soundtrack, amazing characters, fairly decent AI, and most of the gathering quests are more fun.

OMG I love Jesper Kyd's work on the entire Assassin's Creed franchise. As for Far Cry 3 ? I would tread careful when following recommendations from word of mouf. In a totally unrelated matter, I recommend Journey, its too simple and non-gamey to have gotten anything wrong.Lulekani

Yes, Jesper Kyd's music is among my favorites.

I've heard a lot of good things about Journey, and I even own the soundtrack. Sadly, I don't have the cash to buy a PS3, and while I would love to play it, I feel shelling out $400 for a game that lasts about 2 hours just isn't quite worth it. I'll either find someone who owns it, or hope they release it on PC/Xbox.

Games with LOTS of cutscenes and that feel like movies, such as Uncharted 2 and Metal Gear Solid. I'm also not a fan of games with clunky controls like the original Resident Evil.

Generic fetch/kill subquests, especially when they make up a large bulk of the content.

Overuse of minigames, or a game making them essential for progression.

More of the same sequels to games I've already played through.

Bad loading times and frustrating save/checkpoint systems... when the two are combined it can be infuriating.

A short single player mode, I am sick of all of the mulitplayer focused games. BatCrazedJoker

[QUOTE="Lulekani"]OMG I love Jesper Kyd's work on the entire Assassin's Creed franchise. As for Far Cry 3 ? I would tread careful when following recommendations from word of mouf. In a totally unrelated matter, I recommend Journey, its too simple and non-gamey to have gotten anything wrong.Daizengar

Yes, Jesper Kyd's music is among my favorites.

I've heard a lot of good things about Journey, and I even own the soundtrack. Sadly, I don't have the cash to buy a PS3, and while I would love to play it, I feel shelling out $400 for a game that lasts about 2 hours just isn't quite worth it. I'll either find someone who owns it, or hope they release it on PC/Xbox.

I enjoy RPG's, but there's just no way I'm going to play one of these Japanese things where you've got characters that look like they're 12, act like they're 8 and talk like they're 5. The dialogue is embarrassingly awful and you've always got some girl with an extreme case of clinical hyperactivity disorder...no way.

I enjoy RPG's, but there's just no way I'm going to play one of these Japanese things where you've got characters that look like they're 12, act like they're 8 and talk like they're 5. The dialogue is embarrassingly awful and you've always got some girl with an extreme case of clinical hyperactivity disorder...no way.

Jackc8

JRPG

the thought of one sends a shiver down my spine

Long cutscenes and huge breaks in the action due to boring dialogue.