10 Annoying Narrative Video Game Clichés That Need To Die

10. The Unconscious Drag

We'll start off with an easy one - the classic "knocked unconscious, dragged off and then revived elsewhere" trick. Don't be mislead by the header image here, nine times out of ten it's you being dragged, not the terrorist. If you've played a couple of modern first-person shooters, this one will have crossed your path numerous times. It can happen in a number of scenarios, but is usually either just before you finally confront your primary antagonist, just as you think you've got him cornered, or it's an environmental concussion, knocked out by a falling building or an explosion. Your character slumps to the floor, and you are dragged off by a usually unseen entity, as the screen fades to black. In fairness it's not a terrible way of tying two scenes together, and it would have been quite an immersive device had it been a rarity. The problem is that it happens so often it has become hard to remember a shooter where you weren't dragged off into the dark by some berk in a balaclava. Call Of Duty and Battlefield love this trick. Like, really love it. By the time you've played through the entire COD catalog you'll be so tired of being dragged around from pillar to post that you'll start to hope your character wont wake up at all. Instead we get to sit through the same blurry resurfacing bit where we regain consciousness, either with a gun pointed in our faces or a concerned ally fussing over us like something out of ER. Crysis 2 was also a big fan of this, making you feel like some kind of nanosuited rag doll. Perhaps each developer should be given a quota - they can each use the "knocked out and dragged to bugger-knows-where" concept once per game - and if they go over their quota then the lead designer gets knocked out and dragged up and down the parking lot outside the studio.