Gaming The System: Annoying gaming trends that need to stop

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: UBISOFT
Watch Dogs gives you the empty city of Chicago to get virtually bored in.

More often than not, life’s a game of “follow the leader.” If someone seems to be doing something right, why not adapt what he or she does, right? After all, that’s quite literally the definition of a trend.

Trends are important, because they lead to discovering and improving upon current concepts. But sometimes, trends don’t evolve any further from their predecessors and begin to stagnate. And due to a general lack of self-awareness, they continue being used despite said stagnation.

The game industry has always been a fan of running trends into the ground, from the second Mario began to run right and stomp his first Goombah. Some of gaming’s more annoying trends include:

Parkour everywhere

Parkour is undeniably cool. It requires skill and agility that not everyone has, so obviously video games are the best avenue of allowing us to experience such activity, right? Except when everyone decides that it’s the go-to system of travel for every single game. Prince of Persia mixed combat with parkour in a way never before seen. Assassin’s Creed was novel in introducing parkour to an open world setting. Mirror’s Edge gave us a dizzying first-person perspective of it. Prototype and Infamous gave us out-of-this-world sci-fi powers in the mix.

And since then, the ceiling’s been hit, and no one – especially Watch Dogs – got the memo.

Open world with little interactivity

Open-world games can provide hours upon hours of solid exploratory entertainment. But when that novelty of exploration is lost, you better damn well have some interesting items to discover, hidden missions to play or just anything to make exploration genuinely rewarding. Again, Watch Dogs is a recent example of being guilty of this – an open-world Chicago with absolutely nothing to do in, aside from story and a handful of side missions. Mafia 2 has excellent story, and little to no incentive to explore the highly detailed fictional cities of its ‘50s setting.

Horror games becoming more action oriented

Probably the most depressing and frustrating trend for horror fans is the push of beloved scare-series into being more and more action-y. Dead Space blended some serious scares with its combat, making pure brute-force the least effective strategy at times. Dead Space 3, well, eh, not so much. Even the more action-oriented Resident Evil 4 carried an atmosphere thick with chills and creeps compared to the bland, dull Resident Evil 6. And the less said about what’s happened to Silent Hill, the better. With the rise of virtual reality headsets, pure horror games are thankfully making a comeback in the form of newer titles, but you may as well kiss your favourite old franchises goodbye.