This is a list of those sort of missions.
No doubt you've encountered them before. You're minding your own business, having a good time when THAT mission rears its ugly head.
All of a sudden, the game you were enjoying moments before ceases to be fun. Every moment from there on out becomes excruciatingly painful, frustrating and downright annoying. These are the kind of objectives that make you want to throw your control against the wall or simply turn off your console and walk away.
Video games are meant to be an escape from reality. While not always relaxing, the whole point of a video game is to have fun, enjoy a good story, play with friends or, sometimes, do all three at the same time.
Even difficult games can be rewarding in their own way. Just look at Dark Souls for an example. But certain elements of various games throughout history seem only to exist to cause players needless frustration and agony. We can only hope that, by shining the spotlight on these awful gameplay tropes, developers will learn just what makes them so painful. Read on, but be warned, you may become angry just thinking about some of these.
Timed Missions
Worst Offenders: Too Many To Count
If you instantly want to make a gamer sick to their stomach, add a timer. All types of games do this. From platformers to shooters, developers seemingly love to rush players with a countdown clock. What's annoying about this type of mission is that it often flies in the face of the rest of the game. Suddenly the game wants you to go fast and play recklessly, rather than take your time.
Add in the fact that the player is often punished for making the slightest mistake by having to replay the entire sequence, and these types of missions quickly become aggravating. Sometimes, the entire game will be one timed mission. We're looking at you, System Shock.
Hold The Line Missions
Worst Offenders: Call of Duty, GoldenEye 007
The inverse of the timed mission is just as bad. Rather than sprinting for an exit to escape a detonating bomb, players instead must defend a given area for a certain amount of time before help arrives. This usually consists of the game throwing wave upon wave of increasingly powerful enemies at the player in an attempt to overwhelm them.
Oftentimes these types of missions are "unwinnable," in that players must find a way to survive before help arrives, as even if the players kills hundreds of enemies, more will keep coming. Does that sound like fun? It's not. Sometimes these type of missions are combined with escort missions (which we will get to in a bit) for extra pain and suffering, like when players had to defend Natalya in GoldenEye while she hacked computer terminals. Could she possibly hack those computers any slower? We don't think so.
Fetch Quests
Worst Offenders: Every MMO Ever
Nobody likes to have their time wasted, and that's precisely what fetch quests are - time wasters. They have no story significance, they don't reveal anything new about the game and they don't test your abilities in any meaningful way. They exist solely to occupy your time. Go to this spot. Pick up this many flowers. Kill this many enemies. Walk back to town and turn it in.
It's mind-numbing tedium, but games, especially RPGs, use this type of quest to no end. Designing continually interesting and fresh activities for players to participate in, especially in a massive MMO, is no small task, but fetch quests are nothing more than a crutch that RPGs fall back on way too often.
Water Levels
Worst Offenders: Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Water Temple, World of Warcraft's Vashj'ir Zone
There is definitely, definitely such a thing as too much water, and it comes in the form of water levels. The problem with these types of areas is that water levels often require players to adjust, well, water levels, as in raising and lowering the water to open or close certain areas of an environment. Needless to say, these types of missions quickly become confusing. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's infamous Water Temple is probably the best example of this, as having to constantly raise and lower the water quickly becomes a pain. It's so bad that Nintendo even made the temple easier in the 3DS re-release of the game.
When coupled with the fact that 90 percent of video games have awful swimming mechanics, you've got an instant recipe for frustration. Also worth noting is that, just like in real life, video game characters can't see for crap under water, making doing anything beneath the waves beyond frustrating.
Escort Missions
Worst Offenders: Resident Evil 4, Dead Rising, Metal Gear Solid 2
The worst of the worst when it comes to video game objectives: the dreaded escort mission. These often sound simple enough. Just get this NPC character from point A to point B. Easy, right? But the problem with this type of mission is that it often results in the player failing for reasons that aren't entirely within their control. Sometimes the NPC character's AI is simply not as good as it should be, resulting in said NPC standing out in the open as bullets fly overhead or even getting stuck on the environment. Other times it has to do with the fact that the NPC character is completely defenseless and can't fight back.
All of those are contributing factors for why escort missions are the absolute worse, but at the end of the day the honest truth is that nobody wants to baby-sit. Having to hold a NPC character's hand over the course of a level (or in some cases an entire game) is just plain annoying.
Bonus Round: The Underwater Stealth Escort Mission From Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty
If you want to know just how annoying a mission can get, look no further than Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 2. During one segment of the game, the player must escort a young, hydrophobic girl through a series of underwater areas by literally carrying her via piggyback.
Even worse is that she's also deathly afraid of bugs, so of course massive swarms of insects will occasionally block your path, requiring you to spray them with bug spray to continue on. Oh, and did we mention that if you're detected by enemy forces, she curls into the fetal position completely out in the open and cries as she is riddled with bullets?
Like we said, it's one of the most annoying video game missions ever devised, but that was probably the whole point of it being made in the first place. Why do game developers continue to push these types of missions on innocent, unsuspecting players? Do they secretly hate us? We may never know, but we can only hope the developers of the future learn from the games of the past. Seriously, we don't ever need another water dungeon. Ever.
