Games that don’t act like they are games. Too many designers think they are making “high art”. Examples:
Not being able to save any time for any reason - I have a life, stuff happens. I need to be able to save and leave the game at any time - during gameplay, dungeons, cutscenes, any time. Make it a suspend state if it must - but respect reality.
Non-pausable cutscenes - you are not the most important part of my life so you need to be able to pause without losing content.
Non-skippable cutscenes - I might have seen this 10 times before, let me skip.
Dialogue history - if you let me skip dialogue then you must have a dialogue history. I might have hit the skip button by accident so let me see what I missed.
Indicate when there isn’t new dialogue - make the chat options change when there is new dialogue, making it so I have to interact with the NPC or object again just to see if there is new dialogue is infuriating.
Show when an activity will fail - don’t make me search barrels that are empty. Skyrim does this perfectly.
If you have a map let me annotate it - somehow a magicly populating map is allowed in your world but I don’t have a pencil to write “come back here with a shovel”?
Thank you for your thoughtful reply!
Engine limitations I can excuse to a limited degree (it just says to me it wasn’t prioritised correctly) but not for saving any time - at least from the world map, or similar out of engagement situations. If I can save from a church (looking at you, Dragon Quest) I can save from an inn or a bridge or a bush.
I played a game where the cutscenes could only be skipped once loading was done, can’t remember which though - one of the Call of Duty games maybe? That would be a fair compromise.
Drawing maps out by hand is definitely a habit I am pleased not to have to do any more! Back in the days when a game lived in its big box next to my computer it wasn’t a big problem to keep paper in it but nowadays any written notes I made would get lost immediately! If the game designers allow an in game map it should have some basic features like zooming, annotations, and auto-population. I agree that marking every little detail can make a map unusable but it should be my choice as the player what I do with the map, even if that means recording somewhere I found a random horse I want to go back to.
Mostly your comment is making me want to go back to Pillars of Eternity so thank you for that! :)