10 Times Video Games Knew They Were Being Annoying
Just because you're admitting it, doesn't make it okay.
If you’re a long time reader or watcher of WhatCulture you’ll probably have come across a few of our videos detailing the annoying things that video games do which we wish they wouldn’t.
There’s often at least something to gripe about even in the best of games but often knowledge of these irritations seem to breeze right by the game creators. Not so in the following list where developers included a nudge to players that they knew a certain aspect of the current game, its predecessor, or series was pissing fans off.
This doesn’t always mean they went ahead and removed the mechanic or feature causing player frustration, but at least we were all on the same page about it being a pain. And who doesn’t love a bit of self referential and self-deprecating humor?
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10. Gearbox Knows They Stuffed Up The First Borderlands’ Ending
It’s pretty common for developers or publishers to come out and say in interviews that they admit some aspect of their final product was a disappointment, but you don’t often get to see this admission in the series itself.
Such was the case with Borderlands 2. Now, if you don’t know, Borderlands had an absolutely notorious ending that asked players to jump through a tonne of highly saturated, bombastic action hoops only to reward them with essentially nothing. No legendary cache. Just a monster in the vault you’ve been hearing about since the start of the game who you finish off only to realise he wasn’t even guarding anything cool.
Understandably, players were extremely not stoked about this outcome and Gearbox clearly heard that frustration as they threw a line into the beginning of Borderlands 2 that suggested they knew they annoyed players.
The sequel begins with introductory narration from Marcus Kincaid who says, “First, there was the Vault, an alien prison opened with a mystical key. To the warriors who opened it, the Vault was just a container of tentacles and disappointment." Of course, the story continues in a satisfying way in the sequel but before there was a sequel it was a bit of a downer.
Firstly, I’m calling dibs on Tentacles and Disappointment as the name of my punk band, and secondly it’s at least comforting to see Gearbox knew they messed that one up.