Sometimes, even the very best ideas can become bad ones when they start being overused. Other ideas work much better on paper than they do in practice or end up suffering from poor execution. Then there are the ideas that are just plain awful from the very beginning, yet somehow manage to make it past the brainstorming process and find their way into the final release of a game.
After a while, these ideas start to become the norm, appearing in almost every game of a certain type, franchise, or genre. Some are enjoyed by players while others are merely tolerated, but there are a select few that are downright despised. The worst video game tropes serve only to frustrate players and cheapen the overall experience, either by watering down the gameplay or by butchering realism.
5 Impractical Outfits
Most games with combat mechanics tend to feature some sort of armor system, allowing players to toughen up their defensive stats by equipping more resilient gear. One might assume that equipping better armor would cover up more of the playable character's skin to better protect it from blades and projectiles, but this isn't always the case.
In many video games, even the very best armor leaves a lot of the wearer's weakest points unprotected. Though this can be true for characters of both genders, it's an issue that seems to affect women a lot more often than it affects men. This kind of thing can also be seen in purely cosmetic outfits and costumes too, with female characters often wearing incredibly impractical outfits simply for the sake of showing more skin.
4 Crow's Nest Cartography
Unlike some of the other terrible video game tropes, the idea of having to climb to the top of an area's tallest building in order to better understand the lie of the land actually makes a bit of sense. It was one of several innovative ideas implemented throughout the first Assassin's Creed game and one which quickly became a standard of sorts for other open-world games, particularly those developed by Ubisoft.
While it worked well enough in the original Assassin's Creed and several of the game's sequels though, these vantage points have gradually become just another thing for players to cross off of an ever-expanding to-do list. What's more, many modern iterations add things to the map that the protagonist couldn't possibly see from their position, ensuring that the trope has now become just as illogical as it is annoying.
3 Escort Missions
Thankfully, escort missions are nowhere near as prevalent these days as they were back in the nineties and early two-thousands, but they do still crop up again from time to time. For those unfamiliar with the concept, an escort mission is where players must lead an NPC from one place to another while protecting them from enemy attacks. Sometimes they'll help out by attacking enemies, but, mostly, they just stand around being helpless.
Having to protect an NPC with terrible AI can be incredibly frustrating, particularly as many of the people who need escorting seem determined to die. Granted, the idea of having to escort a civilian to safety is very much in keeping with the themes and ideas explored in many modern video games, so escort missions do at least make sense. That doesn't make them a good idea though, nor does it excuse their overuse in certain franchises.
2 Explosive Barrels
The idea that an evil video game organization might keep barrels of explosives on hand is not all that ridiculous. After all, their bases do seem to get raided by the good guys on a somewhat regular basis. However, one suspects that they would keep all of their explosives in a secure location rather than placing them around the base and then stationing armed men and women in the immediate vicinity.
If that weren't ridiculous enough, some games place red barrels randomly around the map with no explanation given as to how they came to be there. Of course, they're obviously there for the convenience of the player, yet in an industry that strives so hard for realism, the decision to compromise the integrity of a game's world for the sake of a few additional explosions seems like a bit of a strange one.
1 Tailing Missions
Tailing missions are terrible. They're slow, unimaginative, and incredibly boring for everyone involved. As far as the worst video game tropes of all time go, this one tends to top most people's lists or at the very least make it into the top three. With this in mind, one can only wonder why certain video game developers continue to put tailing missions into their games when they are so universally despised.
Bad though they may be, most of the other awful video game tropes are there to make things easier or more exciting for the player, whether that be by highlighting points of interest or allowing multiple enemies to be killed with a single, well-placed bullet. Tailing missions, on the other hand, offer nothing in terms of actual gameplay, drag on for an awfully long time, and provide zero challenge to the player; other than perhaps by testing their patience.