10 Annoying Video Game Trends That Must Die In 2017
If it ain't broke... run it into the ground?
Gaming trends can often be polarising, with them leading to advancements in technology or the expansion of certain creative tropes ('vision modes', anyone?), but some drag on and on, reducing what could have been an exceptional step forward for the medium into a tiresome bore.
Trends define what the audience buys and sometimes they can do massively horrible damage, simply because we allow them to fester.
All trends come and go, and it’s not news that the medium of gaming is an ever-changing platform, with creators and developers pushing the boundaries on established concepts. But with certain trends rising and falling with no semblance of predictability, here are 10 that simply need to die in 2017.
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10. Binary Moral Choice Systems
Done right, they can be great, but far too many video games present moral choices as two directly opposing views - 'super do*che', or the guy who stays behind after class to stack the chairs.
And that’s not how moral choice works.
There is an infinitely expansive grey area between those two points. It doesn’t help that games treat you as if you are the scum of the earth simply for killing someone, either. It’s not fair that a game slaps your wrists for entertaining the notion of having fun within a given context, because everyone ultimately goes towards being a good character for fear of getting talked down to like a psycho if you don’t.
Many games with arbitrary moral choices bang you over the head so obviously that it becomes obnoxious. It should be implemented subtly, with the player not being able to tell that their choice is what is affecting the world. It shouldn't be labelled specifically "This is the bad choice"/"This is the good choice", instead it should be woven into the narrative with people contemplating their decisions on a human level, not on the outrageously simplistic scale of two polar opposites.