In today's video game market filled to the brim with copycats and bad clones, what are the fads and trends that you wish would fade away?

I'll start with mine.


Lootboxes/gacha and pay-for-convenience. I don't think I need to explain further and I assume probably 99%+ of the people here will agree.

Extremely difficult "masocore" games. It started with Dark Souls, then Cuphead, and is now spreading like wildfire across PC, console, and mobile. I don't see anything entertaining about a largely unplayable game that's basically a giant reset button.

Roguelike/permadeath. In the 2013-2015 years, this was extremely common among indie video games. I hate permadeath (and any other effort to shortchange the player out of rightfully managing their own local save files on their own terms).

Battle royale. I hate PvP already and team vs. team is bad enough, I don't see how pitting the player vs. 99 others is any better or more entertaining. I also don't see an fun in a PvP game with no respawns.

DOTA/League of Legends style MOBAs. While these could potentially be great without the heavily competitive PvP culture - as it stands, they attract and foster some of the most toxic communities known to video gaming. Every 1-2 months I see a new copycat of this genre on Steam or the iOS App Store, which all follow the same formula.

Zombies. Cheap unoriginal "jump scares", generally boring stuff to fight, and gratuitous gore for a "shock factor" that expired 8 years ago. It started with Left 4 Dead and skyrocketed to popularity with the Walking Dead TV franchise. Since then, zombies have never really gone away and the copycats never end across all major platforms.

Survival. One of my favorite things about regular combat-focused role playing games is that you don't have to concern yourself with survival "needs". There is nothing balanced, skill based, or fun about losing a fight because you ran out of inventory resources or food (imagine the uproar if that happened in a heavily balanced PvP game???), or your equipment broke. Sorry, that isn't skill, that's just a rewrite of broken D&D-style balance where you have to keep a storage depot full of consumables to have a fighting chance. Get to the interesting stuff already, there's nothing fun about virtual foraging for resources.

I find copycatting alone the most annoying, EA is the worst for this as they chase trends so hard but lack the ability to do it timely.

Look at anthem, a fucking mash up of destiny and warframe and its garbage.

Games as a Service

For me personally there is nothing more mindnumbingly boring than a video game with no real story, no narrative arc, just context-less gameplay drowned in monetization mechanics. Mention "service game" in your pitch and you have lost my interest forever.

Spending the first hour or more of a game cosmetically tailoring your character.

I don't like doing it and I almost always just try to hit "default" and get on with it. Some games make it easier than others to just pick a default set up.

Man, I really enjoyed Dark Souls and Cuphead (and some other challenging titles like Spelunky). I much more appreciate games like this that are tough but in a largely fair way. I only get annoyed when there are mechanics in place that are plain unfair or lazy (perfect aim enemies, bulletsponges etc.).

Regenerating health is boring as F and a sad excuse for a lazy game design where you don't have to plan difficulty with health packs.

That every game released today needs to be open world and last for 100 hours+. Just give me quality before quantity. Besides, it's just not manageable to invest that much time into games.

Crafting is also common these days, and it bores me to tears. Come on, do I really have to loot everything and manage restricted inventory with the fear of throwing anything away in case it becomes useful? Terrible design choice.

Bringing unfinished releases to market.

Sequels, sequels, and more annualized sequels

Paid DLC.

Mico-transactions.

obsession with open worlds.

-- and from the audience side --

demanding that all AA and AAA releases be made accessible to all gamers

Wow, I thought I would have a lot to say but... You hit pretty much all points.
I would add "polish/graphics over mechanics". PC games used to be pretty darn weird because devs would often make barely playable games that were stuffed full of mechanics, and I miss that. Devs tried to do too much, more than they could given their budget and hardware, and while that lead to bad sales it was the definition of computer gaming.

And today's games are the opposite where devs try to add as few new mechanics as possible because reviewers/consumers (same thing nowadays) hate new stuff.

Lootboxes and stuff like that don't really effect the singleplayer only RPG/FPS games I play, but I do hate stuff like Assassin's Creed experience point boosters. It's hard to say how much they really effect game balance, but it's hard not to feel like the loot and experience I'm gaining are intentionally slowed to try and convince me to pay more. Luckily this is mostly an Ubisoft thing and I haven't seen it invade THAT many games (so far).

5 years ago I would have said singleplayer FPS campaigns were mostly terrible, very linear with "popamole" gameplay where you mostly stand still and shoot waves of enemies Call of Duty style. These campaigns have really improved the last handful of years though, with Call of Duty getting a bit better post-Black Ops and other series returning with higher quality gameplay like Doom 2016, Wolfenstein The New Order and Titanfall 2 standing out. I don't know how console controllers are handling this return to faster paced gameplay, but I'm happy they've managed it so I can play them on PC.

Honestly my biggest pet peeve is probably too much story focus. Too much *cinematic* story focus maybe I should say, as I'm fine with lore and conversations and stuff like that. There's way too many cutscenes in many games though, and that's been the case for a while. Even big popular games like Witcher 3 are too focused on cinematic storytelling for my taste. You're not making a movie, you're making a game. It's probably been my pet peeve with games for 10+ years, easily.

Let's see...

1) People thinking Dark Souls and Cuphead are extremely difficult

2) Games as service

3) Lootboxes

4) Most microtransactions

5) Denuvo

6) Always online titles

7) Badly done, pseudo RPG upgrade systems in non-RPG titles (Shadow Warrior 2013 for an example)

8) GOG still lacking major releases

9) Huge amount of passive cutscenes in modern games

Trying to monetize nostalgia. Pixels, low-res polygonal "early" 3D, "love letters" to this and "spiritual successors" to that. It's what a lot of people here love, so when I speak of my dislike for it I usually get a lot of hate, but I think it's just lazy, redundant and cheap. It's an excuse for devs to copy old games, employ cheaper graphics and come up with nothing of their own. Instead of looking for fresh, original and ambitious games it locks us in a perpetual nostalgic circlejerk.

The paradox of all those retro games is that the more they want to be like the old games, the less they actually are. Those old games we love were great because they were doing new, exciting things, whether that meant inventive gameplay, new exciting stories or better graphics or a distinct visual style. None of that can be said of a game designed to look, feel and play exactly like some classic title.

Please show us on this puppet where Bethesda touched you inappropriately.

With very few exceptions, I agree with you completely. The indie market is basically made up completely by pretentious 'artistic' crap and lazy pixelated "love letters" to the past.

Games you have to sign up for something just to play
a game you have already purchsed.....LA Noir for example