Not all is fun and games in the land of interactive entertainment. Every gamer has a special pet peeve that see some wild climbing up the wall action. Everyone has a weakness, a special gaming form of kryptonite that makes controllers fly to the floor. What’s adding insult to injury in the most cases is that either those things are just sloppy game design, or the designers hanging on to tradition for all the wrong reasons.
Sure, bossfights are a staple trope of video games. So are cutscenes, so is video game logic. Yep, just like in real life, the final boss does get a whole lot stronger in the punching department when he’s been severely wounded. Every game of the year 20XX needs the fad of the year mechanic – this year it’s AI partners and bows. This is a place where we list our personal top ten pet peeves, the top ten things that make us really lose our cool. But this is just us, feel free to contribute your gaming pet peeve in the comments below!
Escort Quests
Nothing is more frustrating than a mission where you have to babysit an idiot AI that does everything it can to get killed over and over again. Bonus anger points if the game features friendly fire, and the AI runs into your attacks all the time. This is all down to AI scripting. Some games can pull this off nicely without it being a horrible, horrible chore. And by some, I mean few.
Most escort quests are horrible. And the games this year that were basically built around them, did good by making the escorted AI mostly invincible and invisible to the enemies. I do not want to imagine how many controllers I would have wasted, if The Last of Us’ AI would have had to be stealthy too.
