10 Video Game Clichés Everyone Is Sick Of
Open area? Combat encounter. EVERY TIME.
The video game industry absolutely thriving and getting bigger every year is good news for everyone but the sheer volume of them has seen certain tropes steadily rise to the surface.
More and more games mean we end up seeing the same mechanics, plot points, and stereotypes over and over again and this can get a little grating. Or in this case, a lot grating. We’ve collected 10 cliches in video games that we would love to see the end of. None of these are necessarily hurting the games they’re a part of, in fact plenty of them can be found in absolute masterpieces, but we’d still love to see much less of them.
These video game mechanics, story beats, and features might be minor, but these are annoyances most of us can agree we’d really prefer our video games without.
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10. Town Is A Walking-Only Zone
This one is a mechanic that has become so commonplace it’s essentially a cliche at this point, and an unwelcome one at that even if there are good reasons it exists.
It makes sense that when you’re exploring a meticulously designed game world like that of Red Dead Redemption 2, the devs would really rather not have you hooning around camp. Which, just in case you’re not Australian, means any anti-social behaviour in a motor vehicle, or in this case the horse Red Dead demands you leave outside the camp so you don’t trample your fellow gang members. Similarly, Cyberpunk 2077 has safe zones that won’t let you use your fancy cybernetic jump legs. Which is annoying because I bought those legs and I should be able to use them if I want to use them.
Is this a minor annoyance? Sure. Is it a pain to all of a sudden slow down whenever you’re in town? Absolutely. But it still happens all the time so the cliche is unfortunately very established.