I’ve played quite a bit of Watch Dogs lately. I picked it up on launch and finished the main story on Thursday that week. Since then I’ve tried out all the mini-games, spent some time in multiplayer and have even managed to enjoy messing up Chicago with a friend online.
I thought the game was pretty good. It did a nice job combining Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry 3 and Splinter Cell with a little dash of cool hacking abilities. That being said, like any video game, Watch Dogs has problems. After seeing some of the many pet peeves that resulted after people played this new IP it got me thinking: “Which of the smallest problems is the most annoying in gaming overall?” And now we are here.
As always with my top five lists, these are my personal choices. They’re not 100% objective and it’s likely that your pet peeves will most likely differ from mine. So without further ado, let’s get this started!
5. Multiplayer Restrictions
Watch Dogs isn’t the only video game to suffer from this issue. Now what do I mean exactly? Well, anytime a multiplayer component doesn’t have something that it should is something that I find a problem.
In the case of Watch Dogs, after seeing the multiplayer trailer I was looking forward to the idea of hacking friend’s games. Unfortunately, the Hacking and Tailing multiplayer modes are forced to have a ranking system, and as a result there are no option for private matches in these two modes. This leads to a simple question: “Why couldn’t they just have private matches and not give experience so people didn’t exploit the system?”
I don’t think I would be the only person to happily sacrifice in-game experience points for the joy of taunting my friend who ran past me for the umpteenth time as I hack their phone. For goodness sake, there are people that will play Prop Hunt in Garry’s Mod for hours on end. We don’t need to earn experience in every single thing we do in order to keep playing; we just want fun.
This frustration also goes for games that only have quick match or server lists, not both. In Call of Duty: Black Ops everyone complained that they couldn’t play Wager Match game types in private matches with friends. So what do they do in MW3? Move the silly game types to private matches only…sheesh. Why is it so hard to have the best of both worlds? Even Battlefield games have been pissing me off with this. Why does the PC server browser have trouble finding more than three games with players on them, yet the 360 version can find a whole list of completely full servers?
Inconsistency is frustrating in general when it comes to video games, but it’s even worse when it involves trying to connect with other people online. Halo 2 got most things right – excluding server lists – all the way back in 2004 and we still have games that somehow manage to screw it up.
4. Top Speeds of Vehicles in Sandbox Games
Gran Turismo 2 was the very first video game I played. Up until I was ten years old driving games were basically all I ever spent time on. Now I’m not saying that sandbox games need to have a perfect driving model, as that’s not their main focus. For whatever reason though, most sandbox games vehicles have a top speed that can be reached in a matter of seconds. It’s as if all of they have one gear. So it really pissed me off when I started up Watch Dogs and found out that it suffers from the same thing!
You get into a badass muscle car, head out on the highway and just when you’re about to start looking for adventure you hit the limiter and you are then forced to have to listen to the same engine note for the next five minutes. That is easily the worse part. I found it funny when Angry Joe brought this up in his Ride to Hell review, because I have memoires of playing Saints Row 2 where you get a Lamborghini look-a-like, hit the top speed almost instantly and are subjected to hearing the same engine note ad-nauseam.
I like the vehicle physics in Watch Dogs and whenever I’m in a car chase going through the city it’s a lot of fun, but when I get on the highway to get from one side of the city to the other, it becomes a complete bore. I never thought GTA V would have the best driving model in a sandbox game but it does.
3. Bad Licenced Soundtracks
Something that turns a boring real-life drive into a full on chore is not finding anything decent on the radio. I understand that sandbox games generally try to emulate aspects of real life but this is not something they should copy. There’s an interesting dichotomy that’s been happening lately.
There are a lot of games these days with great original scores. Ubisoft has a track record of hiring talented composers for their games. Everything from Watch Dogs to Blood Dragon has a great original soundtrack. Yet, so many games have really lost their way when it comes to licenced music. When one of the more catchy songs in a GTA game is a Britney Spears track, it’s time for Rockstar to head back to the drawing board.
After growing up with GTA: San Andreas, SSX 3, Gran Turismo, Project Gotham Racing and the earlier Tony Hawk games, going through radio stations and not finding a single song that resonates is disappointing. What’s more, Watch Dogs did have a few kick ass songs… in one of the mini-games. The digital trip mini-game called “Madness” had some badass synth music from Lazerhawk and Gost and yet they’re hidden away in this one game mode that most people probably never even played.
Sound guys, keep the original scores, those are awesome. But, with the licensed soundtracks, maybe you should go back and re-examine those earlier titles.
2. Unrealistic Conversations
I mentioned this in my Mass Effect 4 article so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much. I’m hopeful for Dragon Age Inquisition but the E3 Demo did have one thing that irks me as a whole. Video games generally have a cringe curve in the dialogue and writing. If you try watching a cutscene from a video game without knowing the context or having played it for several hours, it’s probably going to sound a bit awkward. Once you get over that curve though, you can then take everything seriously.
There are many games that I’ve played where the developers seem to not really care about overcoming this cringe curve, and this can be a problem. Practically every RPG dialogue tree suffers from this with characters saying things in a way that no human being would articulate what they are actually saying. You generally get this in side quests. Using the Dragon Age Inquisition demo as an example, at the beginning you walk up to someone and she immediately says, “Templar bastards killed my husband and stole the ring from his finger”. Uh…was there a previous conversation that we missed? Yep, conversations like this, that just start out of nowhere, can be quite bothersome.
1. Wonky Hitboxes
I hate bad cover systems as much as the next person, but even without cover I can usually takedown at least a few enemies with me. That is unless a monkey with a keyboard programmed the hit boxes around the enemies I am playing against. When I play a shooter, where one of the main goals is to shoot people, and I shoot someone and nothing happens, I am slightly baffled.
Whether it’s Mass Effect 3 or Counter Strike, it’s always infuriating when it happens. I can forgive it in a laggy multiplayer match but when it happens in an offline single player game there should be no excuse. This kind of thing really takes me out of the game and I just stare at the screen and wonder how this may have passed the Q&A stage. I mean really, how the heck did it pass?
So what really pisses you off when you’re playing a game? We’ve listed off five things here but what grinds YOUR gears? Sound off in the comments!