8 TINY Things Video Games Do That Drive Us Crazy
7. Missable Items
The main advantage to open world games is exploring at your own pace. You can go in whatever direction you like, at whatever time, and tackle tasks depending on your mood.
But this openness has to be scrutinised properly, lest you raise the ire of gamers. If areas are only to be visited at certain times or just once, they better not contain anything that players might miss on their first run-through.
This is a problem with the likes of Dragon's Dogma, Arkham Origins, Bloodborne, almost every game in the Final Fantasy series... but for a recent, and particularly stinking example, let's look at Resident Evil 4 Remake.
The game adapts plenty of more explorative elements over the original RE4 but is still strictly linear. There are certain points where the game stops you from returning to older areas. Thankfully, the the mysterious Merchant warns you about this with the all-too transparent "point of no return" dialogue.
However, the real issue is that they are certain rooms that you can only access once. After you're through an area, you're not coming back. The most egregious example is playing as the defenceless Ashley, chased by terrifying suits of armour where you can run right past your single opportunity to grab a particular treasure. There's also a gun on the wall that you assume you have to come back and grab as Leon, but you need to interact with it as Ashley first to unlock it.
Overlook these and you have to replay the whole game again if you want to get every last thing, because there's no chapter select! It's a great game but is it worth doing another run just for one piece of treasure because the developers put it in a stupid place?