Are Games Becoming More Annoying to Play?

I have to admit that at times, I just can’t help but whine about something. This is especially true if it happens to be something that truly “grinds my gears”. Where gaming is concerned, those gripes tend to be traced back to something ridiculous like digital rights management (DRM). But today, I have a rant of a different sort, though still gaming-related.

Because of what I do here at Techgage, I find myself forced to test out a lot of new PC games. After all, we can’t be benchmarking with the same game titles for years, right? In addition to the admission above, something that plagues me is that although I test out an insane number of games, I rarely ever actually “play” one. The last game I played through was Modern Warfare 2. Before that? Half-Life 2: Episode Two. I still game, but it’s usually with my favorite MMORPG, or with an online FPS.

But despite my lack of “real” game-playing with newer titles, I can’t help but notice something that I consider to be a growing trend of game annoyances. No, I’m not talking about the actual difficulty levels of the games I’m goofing around with, but the process of actually getting to play them to begin with!

The first time I played a game where I noticed a real problem was Grand Theft Auto IV. For those who haven’t played this one on the PC, it requires a Games for Windows account to both play and save your games. If you deliberately tried to stay away from ever having such an account, tough luck. It’s not so much the requirement of having an account that bothers me, it’s that when its all tied to the game, the result is clunky, and unintuitive.

When the game is first launched, you need to either sign-up or log-in. Because there have been GFW updates made since that game launched, you are forced to download the latest in order to play. Here’s where things get frustrating. Even if you checked the box to keep yourself signed in the first time you logged in, the update will cancel it out, meaning you have to manually type in your credentials again.

Sure, this seems minor. But look at the game in the screenshot above: Batman: Arkham Asylum. It does the exact same thing. I’ll admit that it’s a bit easier to deal with, but not by much. I should stress that without signing into your GFW account, you won’t have access to your saved games. So if you transport your saved files from one PC to another, you still need to sign into GFW in order to use them.

Then there are non-GFW annoyances, like the one Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood brings about. For whatever reason, rather than have a simple setup where you simply save a game and load it later, the game makes you create what’s essentially a user account. Oh, and you absolutely can’t avoid using a password for it. You can conveniently make sure the game can save the password each time, but isn’t a password just a bit excessive for a game that doesn’t even have a multi-player mode?

I’ll be honest in saying that the main reason that these issues bother me so much is likely due to the fact that I deal with these games often, sometimes multiple times a week. Because of that, I encounter the same annoyances over and over, so they really stand out. But, there are other issues I find utterly bizarre that anyone would notice. Take Modern Warfare 2, for example.

I can’t begin to understand why, but this game doesn’t feature a typical save/load function at all. Instead, you are forced to allow the game to auto-save for you, and because of the total lack of a manual save, you can’t go back to some point earlier in the mission if you feel like you need to. Doesn’t it seem a little odd to omit such a basic feature like this? Could you imagine if games like Half-Life 2 or Crysis did this? People would freak out!

But, as I said, I do tend to be a whiner at times, so maybe none of this is truly a big deal. I’m interested in hearing opinions from you guys, so hit up our discussion thread!