10 TINY Issues That Made You Hate Great Recent Video Games
Aloy's abundant hair-jank in Horizon Forbidden West is so, so annoying.
Making even a merely good video game is nothing short of a miracle - the result of typically hundreds of artists and programmers pooling their skills in tandem to deliver a dynamic work of art.
A great game, however, is another beast entirely, because to craft an interactive experience that players want to get lost in for dozens or even hundreds of hours requires an intangible collision of skill and luck.
Yet we as gamers are a fickle bunch, and even the best-crafted video game can be "ruined" for us by a small gripe or insignificant issue that really gets our goat.
We all have our individual hang-ups and things that irritate us about modern game design, and in the case of these 10 recent video games, each dared render their greatness irrelevant because of one tiny annoyance in the middle of it.
Perhaps a persistent graphical glitch repeatedly distracted you, there was a little too much dialogue, or the game for some reason lacked a certain basic, expected quality-of-life feature.
No game is perfect, and even when developers get close, players will always find something to complain about. Case in point...
10. No Quit To Desktop - Elden Ring
Now, Elden Ring certainly isn't the only game guilty of this, but it is the one that's been pissing countless PC players off with it as of late.
For reasons that remain unclear, the PC version of FromSoftware's otherwise incredible action-RPG lacks a simple "Quit to desktop" option in its menu.
Rather than pressing ESC and being able to quit the game with a single click, you're forced to quit to the main menu, sit through two splash screens, wait for the online connection to load, and only then can you finally exit the game.
It can take around 20 seconds to do what any PC game should let you do in no more than one or two - terminate the session and get on with the rest of your day.
It might sound like a nitpick - and, yes, that's really what this list is all about - but it's also a minor annoyance that becomes deeply irritating once you've sunk dozens or even hundreds of hours into this thing over innumerable play sessions.
For such a wonderfully polished game, it's a bafflingly clunky piece of UI design.