Most frustrating thing in a video game

[Sinewmire]

That's one reason to hate on Final Fantasy 12 as well, which punishes the player for actually taking the time to loot every treasure chest as they proceed in the game. You can't get the best weapon because you looted some random chest earlier in the game, congrats.

Yeah, I haven't played any of the newer final fantasies, but my friends are all certain Square have sold their souls to the strategy guide demons. You can't get the supermegaultrasword because you didn't buy the strategy guide which told you not to visit room 4456 in the third act before kicking over the statue of McPedro. Or whatever.

personally I find enemies whose "difficulty" is based on the fact that clearly are "cheating" rather then being actually difficult (once you figure out what to do and can perform it successfully), fighting game bosses are the worst imho at this but it's not limited to there.

This is why I find Total War games frustrating after a short while. I like the actual fighting, but I'd like to be able to ruin my opponents' infratructure. I'd like them not to be able to afford to send ten million men at me every turn when I have all the moneys and can't seem to maintain an army of 500. Urgh.

[Eternal_Freedom]

When the final level of a game before the ultimate boss fight is harder than the boss fight itself. Case in point, I replayed Return to Castle Wolfenstein the other week, on hardest just for the hell of it. Final castle level full of Elite Guards and paratroopers (for some reason) took my fourteen fucking attempts whilst the final bos fight against Heinrich I did first time.

Humbug.

[Guardsman Bass]

It would be nice to have dungeons with set-ups that feel more like a real building/castle/etc instead of "run over here to push Block A into the slot, then run over there to hit the switch." I'm replaying Tales of the Abyss, and while I love the game, the dungeons are pretty much a textbook example of the latter. Amnesia: The Dark Descent, on the other hand, felt much more like the former.

[Broken]

Levelled enemies are highly frustating. I will not play Skyrim untill a mod fixes ALL forms of level scaling.

Invincible NPCs are another.

While I do agree that leveled enemies suck, they did a decent job of it in Skyrim (at least so far, only picked it up recently on a steam sale) or at least its far, far less obvious and then in Oblivion. But then, I'm not even through with a relatively quick first, vanilla run-through before I start trying mods.

[Skgoa]

Cheating AI is the absolute worst thing in any video game to me. If the AI is not held to the same gameplay mechanics I am, then they're pointless.

Ai is very difficult to program. In some games, cheating Ai is the only way to get a challenge.

It is very much possible to have non cheating AIs that can win in shooters, real time strategy and even turn based. Heck part of Galactic Civilizations 2s claim to fame was that the AI could mop the floor with most players without any cheating.

The reason you have cheating AI in games is players. AI receives the LEAST amount of focus when making a game. This is because there is no financial incentive towards good AI. Games with horrible AIs are still praised to high heavens and make tons of $$ so why should we bother ? Why make real AI when smoke and mirrors is more than sufficient ?

Even worse, players, game "journalists" and even game developers have a very strange notion of what AI is. I.e. even the simplest deterministic "if->then" scripts are sometimes heralded as "very intelligent ai", when in fact it's just a coder sitting in an office somewhere who put in all his intelligence to make it work. Anecdote: I like the Panzer General remak Panzer General Forever. It has a reputation for having a "much improved AI"... it has nothing like that. The computer is making extremely basic and predictable moves. I don't think it cheats, but the scenarios are stacked against the player from the start. And there are many many games like this out there.

[Starglider]

The reason you have cheating AI in games is players. AI receives the LEAST amount of focus when making a game. This is because there is no financial incentive towards good AI. Games with horrible AIs are still praised to high heavens and make tons of $$ so why should we bother ? Why make real AI when smoke and mirrors is more than sufficient ?

AI consumes both development budget and hardware resources; all the CPU that could go on AI is in demand for fancy physics, and machine vision requires GPU power that is at an absolute premium on our creaky old consoles. Also complex AI makes testing and debugging much harder, and programmers qualified to write good AI are much more expensive than if-then-else scripters. Going to a new console generation will help significantly, but game review and marketing methodology emphasises stuff that looks good in 30 second trailers and screenshots, for which scripting is far better and cheaper than AI. Ultimately the solution is licensed reusable character AI similar to licensed physics / graphics / animation engines, but as of now that's still a pipe dream (for various complicated reasons).

[HeadCreeps]

Yeah, I haven't played any of the newer final fantasies, but my friends are all certain Square have sold their souls to the strategy guide demons. You can't get the supermegaultrasword because you didn't buy the strategy guide which told you not to visit room 4456 in the third act before kicking over the statue of McPedro. Or whatever.

Even though I would tend to agree about Square Enix being inferior to the old Squaresoft, this is hardly a recent development. Even in the NES era, there were missable items in jRPGs that no sane person was ever going to discover without outside help. Dragon Quest (Square Enix) had these sorts of things all over the place. Final Fantasy had those hidden pathways everywhere in the NES/SNES era (I think this started with FF3 on the NES), and even if you were asinine enough to check every wall in every dungeon, you can still miss them easily. The PS1 era wasn't really different and I can list many more from Square Enix's lesser known titles as well.

What I described for FF12 was really the lead developer's signature. For example, he directed FFT wherein there is a skill that was required to find a huge amount of items that no normal player without a guide would ever find. Furthermore, even if you stumbled upon the location, you were more likely to find a crap item (RNG) than you were to luck out and get the hidden item. Another game he directed was Vagrant Story, which had the same problem with extremely difficult to find hidden items. None of this was quite the punch in the face that the treasure box thing with FF12 was though, because now it didn't hurt just completionists but also the casual player just looking to pick up the best item in the game.

The problem with Square Enix is really that it picked up a bunch of bad game devs from Enix, which has always been hit-or-miss, and also that their main talent from the SNES/PS1 era which made them famous has almost all left the company over the years.

[The Yosemite Bear]

the cheating computer is always my pet peeve. especially when AI you are allied with pulls fleet out of it's arse, and attacks you after you get done beating down the folks who were raping them....

[Bakustra]

The Squaresoft example is just part of a phenomenon common to all video games. Video games often have to appeal to multiple audiences, the biggest split of which is between casual and focused players. RTS and FPS games traditionally have been able to appeal to this split by using multiplayer, and a number of games have difficulty levels, so that focused and casual players can have a tailored experience. jRPGs have some real problems with implementing difficulty levels, and competitive multiplayer is limited thus far to Pokemon and its cohorts. So the implementation of obscurity and superbosses are there primarily to reward focused (or in the extreme cases obsessive) players. Of course, this can go overboard, like with the Zodiac Spear or arguably Move-Find Item (which required a roughly backwards style of play to the rest of the game to take full advantage of), but these things are probably here to stay unless jRPGs undergo a revolution in playstyle.

[HeadCreeps]

(which required a roughly backwards style of play to the rest of the game to take full advantage of)

Is that a reference to the whole use Rafa (or anyone, but she has the lowest Brave) and turn her into a chicken thing?

What causes frustration is missable items, not obscurity itself. It would be fine if a player can still get the Zodiac Spear* or the Escutcheon 2 (FFT) at the end of the game even though they missed it. The problem is definitely the fact that the player finds out he or she just lost 20-100 hours with a game if they want x thing in it because now they have to start the game over to get it. Obscure items or grinding for a superpowered boss in the endgame content for jRPGs is definitely worth keeping.

*IIRC you can, if you don't mind the ridiculously low chance of getting it from a box. RNG-based difficulty is so godawful.

[The Yosemite Bear]

yeah, that inevitable betrail is inspired by Medival/empire total war, where I'm in an Alliance with a nation, we have great trading status and are fighting a common enemy, and I take the pressure off them, from said enemy tearing into their territory, They suddenly attack my border with them, with an army that given the size of the infrastructure rape our enemy has inflicted on both of us, there's no way they could field...

[xthetenth]

If you're talking about Medieval 2, that's because the reputation system is totally borked so that peacefully occupying cities has the reputation change from a partially commented out set of effects for razing a town. So being a peaceful conqueror pisses everyone off hardcore.

[Stark]

Outside of games that just aren't any good, which others have covered, the greatest source of frustration for me is bad netcode. A game can be as good as it wants, but if it uses shitty netcode with high latency, frequent lag spikes or sync issues, its fucked. If it uses a shitty lobby or has bad UI flow for arranging, setting up and starting games, its fucked. If the servers themselves are constantly overloaded, frequently dropping, or losing progression or stats, its fucked.

Some multi is such a hackjob players get giant lag the second they step into a vehicle. Some games have such terrible netcode finishing a round without being interrupted by lag or drops is hard. And some games are made by people who have obviously never played a multiplayer game and don't know what people expect from stats backends, UI frontends, play flow or any of a range of other elements of multiplayer. It doesn't matter what the actual play mechanics are like for these games, because they cannot be experienced without looking through the lens of dogshit netcode.

[spaceviking]

yeah, that inevitable betrail is inspired by Medival/empire total war, where I'm in an Alliance with a nation, we have great trading status and are fighting a common enemy, and I take the pressure off them, from said enemy tearing into their territory, They suddenly attack my border with them, with an army that given the size of the infrastructure rape our enemy has inflicted on both of us, there's no way they could field...

At least it is not as bad as my experience with with Empire. I can conquer France with a 2/3 strength army, but somehow the Inuit in Newfoundland has two full stack armies.