10 Small Details Video Games Still Can’t Get Right

7. Characters Berating You For Exploring

Uncharted 4 Nate Elena
Naughty Dog

A developer's biggest nightmare is a player getting stuck in a level. The player in question might be thick as mince, but it will always be a perceived issue with the clarity of the level design or specific mechanic that gets the blame.

Consequently, should you not be barrelling towards each new objective in your average action game, you'll no doubt hear either the character you're playing as or a nearby NPC say they need to stop wasting time and get a move on.

The occasional nudge is fine, but sometimes you might just stop for ten seconds and get someone shouting in your ear about where you need to go next.

Maybe you just want to admire the scenery and the work the devs put into painstakingly detailing the environment, or maybe you want to indulge your curiosity and look for hidden secrets but no, the game does not have time for that.

The same issue hurts puzzles as well. The joy of these sections comes from pretending you're intelligent for a moment, but spend more than a minute mulling it over and the character will just blurt out the answer more often than not.

If you don't trust a player to figure it out themselves, then what's the point of putting them in in the first place?

Advertisement
In this post: 
Mass Effect
 
Posted On: 
Contributor

Josh has over 11 years of experience as a published writer, having worked nine of those years as a full-time content producer at WhatCulture. In that period he has created hundreds of articles, videos and podcast episodes for multiple WhatCulture channels, specialising in gaming, horror and film & TV. He now primarily works as a senior content producer and presenter on WhatCulture Gaming where he co-hosts the WhatCulture Gaming Podcast, a top 3 UK most listened to gaming podcast that he co-created in 2018. Over the years he has reviewed several high-profile gaming releases, covered industry events with on-site reporting, opined on breaking news, and even kicked off his interviewing career by chatting to childhood hero, Tommy Wiseau.