Gacha, paid time skips, and AFK gameplay are terrible things to do to a game and mobile games always end up catching all 3.
Legit disease on gaming.
8 Likes
Micro transactions.
Allowing them promotes laziness in development.
6 Likes
My guess was the stuff like Jaina killing all the blood elves in dalaran, but we are all friends again now. 
I’d put down, lack of lasting and logical consequences in lieu of that. I don’t mind the peace we have now, but there should be some tension after everything that has happened. This feels really Disneyfied where everyone lives happily ever after.
2 Likes
1 Like
Most games having crafting systems for no reason.
Unless you’re a survival game or an MMOrpg with an economy get that outta here.
2 Likes
Battle royal needs to die and the idea a fantasy game needs elves needs to go too
Inventory management trope needs to go bye bye. The reason it doesn’t is because they target it for MTX or other services (or its an actual part of the game, which can be good or bad)
There’s only a couple games where I don’t mind managing inventory and they both have zombies in them.
Fallout 76 you have limited space, on some builds you basically can’t carry anything, but there are multitudes of ways to remedy it that don’t involve an MTX.
But beyond the MTX factor, most of the mmos I played have disgusting sight pictures upon opening up your inventory. It’s just endless amounts of random crap. In Lost Ark, the endless crap is insane and you can barely see what it is and there is no type of good sorting feature or organization button or anything, it’s just hey, open up this giant crate stuffed full of microscopic knick knacks and rifle through it.
These games where people wank off the art team nonstop. Then you open up your bag and the icons don’t make any type of sense and have no human intuition to them, they all might as well just be question mark icons. The art team can only create the picture, they need actual direction for icons to make sense.
A sympathetic villain whose actions are excused due to their tragic backstory. The writer also takes this bias when writing the villain.
9 Likes
I r woman…hear me rawrz.
3 Likes
Lots of really good entries are already mentioned in this list which I’m giving thumbs up to. Here’s a couple I’m tired of that I don’t think have been mentioned yet or I want to add to:
-When a writing team is sophomoric at best so when trying to write a new villain, to give him/her some weight, they retcon all previous events to actually have been the work of the new villain all along when clearly that wasn’t the case. It’s a double whammy because one, no that doesn’t suddenly make the new villain great, and two, it cheapens or ruins previous villains and writing that was so much better. (Ex: the Jailer, Shadowlands)
-As an extension to something Workingstiff already said, the lack of free will, especially in WarCraft, has been a theme revisited again and again. It’s one thing if its necromancy raising a dead body as a mindless husk. Really, the person that was there is no longer there and its just meat being used to slash claws, swing a sword, etc. But it’s another when you have Paladins suddenly switching to helping the enemy they’ve been fighting their whole life, naturistic druids suddenly joining fire-based primalists, etc. I think the funniest one was in Shadowlands with the Kyrian storyline. They’d been driving a point repeatedly that Kyrians spend their eternal afterlife honing their combat skills, discipline, and full attention all in tireless service of their faction’s main goals, and then a Maldraxxi baddie waves a stick at one of the higher rank Kyrians and poof he immediately becomes a diehard Maldraxxi fanboy that switches sides.
…if it isn’t clear, I really hate the writing in Shadowlands, but that 2nd one is indeed something that has plagued WarCraft for a while.
1 Like
Reliance on “The Holy Trinity”. WoW originally tried to steer away from this until Greg Street took over with his screwball philosophy that “role-playing” referred to a player’s role in a group. It’s been downhill ever since.
Attacking mobs while a player is executing it.
No reason to waste energy or ammo on doing so.
Let the guy have his moment.
-
The inability to write decent, relateable, believable female characters.
-
The antagonist being evil just because, mwahahahaha!
1 Like
You forgot 3rd one
The “I was a good guy all along! I was prepping us for the guy whose bigger then me!”
It’s been done with illidan, it’s been done with the handsome Squidward in a goldshire outfit (jailer).
And I’m sure it’s been done a 3rd time somewhere
4 Likes
Join hands and overcome all past feuds to fight against the greater evil! So boring.
Yes! You’re so right.
1 Like
MCU-level writing and dialogue. It needs to be erased from existence.
That “Endgame” scene from Guardians of the Dream was the most embarrassing cutscene in the entire game. Well, maybe behind Warbringers: Sylvanas.
Can’t get more embarrassing than a ranger being mindless enough to go melee against a Death Knight. Is that your “tactical genius”? 
3 Likes
People trying to justify horrible game design with " its an rpg"
3 Likes
RPG mechanics in games that aren’t RPGs. Especially in relatively recent years they seem to just be an excuse to artificially extend play time by making a game needlessly grindy at best and encouraging predatory extra monetization at worst.
Designated quirky/funny characters in games that otherwise take themselves seriously. In theory these characters are fine and can potentially provide levity, but in practice they’re often written similarly poorly and more often end up cringey or annoying instead genuinely entertaining. I extend this sentiment to most modern instances of the writing style I’ve come to call ‘Whedonese’.
This one might arguably be a bit too infrequent to really be considered a trope, but I also want to mention sewer levels that are presented as self-aware jokes. It’s not funny if you still make the player go through an actual sewer level.
Lastly a couple meta ones:
Publishers forcing the release of unfinished games under the expectation that the product will be patched later. There are so many games that’ve gotten their reputations ruined by tainted first impressions because of it.
Games getting existing content cut to be sold as ‘dlc’
Addendum:
Fixation of aesthetic realism and/or cinematic look or feel. These were once interesting and impressive when we were first getting tech that could better pull it off, now at times it feels like companies are actively sacrificing overall quality and substance in the name of these things.
One more Addendum:
I’ve mostly seen this with JRPGs, but blatant illusion of choice. Particularly I’m talking about instances where you get a dialogue choice of some sort but every option besides what the game wants you to choose just loops back. If you wanted a specific thing to happen, just make it happen; why even include the selection in the first place?
3 Likes
the trope where character dies but actually they didnt die because we ran out of ideas and still need more characters… yea… this is totally not me hating the ysera plot in df…
1 Like