10 Outdated Video Game Design Tropes That Must Die

8. Stopping The Game To Dump Exposition

Exposition-based "tell, don't show" storytelling is one of the laziest and most irritating narrative devices that a game can employ, and it's used constantly.

While games like Uncharted generally do a solid job of keeping the laboured chit-chat minimal and allowing a lot of the action to do the real talking, too often games will simply stop the player dead in their tracks and vomit up reams of robotic information about the plot and characters.

Perhaps no AAA game in recent memory has done this quite as blatantly as Horizon Zero Dawn, which throughout its campaign required players to watch numerous post-mission hologram recordings which ladled out the plot in the driest and most yawn-inducing fashion possible.

For a game otherwise overflowing with creative ideas, it was embarrassing.

The Metal Gear Solid franchise is the undisputed king of this trope, though, with Hideo Kojima frequently serving up cutscenes of up to an hour in length which mechanically outline the hilariously convoluted plot.

As entertainingly barmy as the MGS games are, they're also a prime example of how less can be more. Nobody needed to sit through a solid 40 minutes of gasbagging - much of it in visually bland codec conversations - just to get to the final boss in MGS2.