I don't like durability mechanics when its clearly there just to waste your time or money or whatever. Any game that makes you do more hiking to repair benches than fighting is either getting a thumbs down or I'm going to download a mod.
It is a fine line, like in Minecraft durability obviously makes sense, so it makes sense that other games try to emulate that. But then look at Stardew Valley, one of the most popular mods is the one that stops fences from degrading because repairing them is tedious.
Can you make fences out of stone or metal, or just wood, in SV? Because I recall Harvest Moon DS allowed you to make stone fences, which were a lot more likely to survive hurricanes and snowstorms
Yeah you can make stone, iron, and hardwood fences too. Only real difference is that they last longer respectively, but you still need to eventually replace them. Which is still kinda tedious.
Breath of the Wild is generally pretty good about letting you explore your own way. For example, the exposition ghost at the start explicitly acknowledges you could go straight to the final boss after leaving the tutorial area if you want, and there are plenty of ways a determined player can reach areas faster than the typical progression routes would take them.
But my goodness the pitiful weapon durability made me want to avoid combat. I distinctly remember coming across a white lionel relatively early and determining I shouldn't bother trying to fight simply because I didn't have enough weapons to get through its health bar.
Yup. I played through BotW always holding onto things I thought were good because the stupid durability mechanic made me hoard stuff.
When I started TotK I decided to turn durability off and see if I enjoyed more and I absolutely did. Made the game way better. The only thing that broke was some balancing around crafted weapons. For example you can take a stick and slap a horn on it and get a very powerful, but brittle, weapon. With durability off it just becomes a very powerful weapon, which pretty much matches or beats any proper weapon you can find. If you think that's too hacky you can just make a rule for yourself not to craft things like that.
Many games have gone through this and time and time again scarcity makes people not use things. In Witcher 2 you had to craft potions manually by collecting all the ingredients each time. In Witcher 3 they just replenish after a rest if you have alcohol on you. 2 is more realistic, but the work involved (and the fact that you had to drink them before combat started) made them too much of a pain and I just went without. In 3 you can simply use them and not worry.
I played BotW with 4x durability mod and it was soooo much better.
I expected to do the same for TotK, but the fusion system made things infinitely more durable than the breaking garbage weapons of BotW, so I didn’t have to mod durability in.
Game has collectables scattered in almost every room including lore text and audio logs.
Meanwhile the story NPC is nagging you to move on every 30 seconds on a loop and won't shut the fuck up. Because play testing revealed most of their players are fucking morons and get lost in one way apartment rooms I guess.
These two mechanics conflct with one another way too often and it's immersion breaking every time.
Fuck, this annoys me so much. The new-ish sony games are awful with it (Spider-man and GoW at least), providing beautiful, intricate worlds and levels to explore, but if you aren't sprinting toward the next objective at every moment, it constantly bombards you with little nagging voicelines from npcs or even the main character themselves. I hate it.
First game that came to mind was RD2. I remember a mission at the beginning, where you're meant to clear out some Plinkertons from a house, and I remember one of the camp NPCs asking you to look around for supplies (or maybe something specific).
As soon as you're able to leave the area, Dutch starts screaming at you to hurry tf up. A friend and I will occasionally quote him when we're being jokingly impatient with one another: "C'MON ARTHUR, QUIT HORSIN' AROUN'! WE AIN'T GAHT ALL DAAAY!"
I also hate that gamers in general have been so cooked in mtxs they don't even realize that pay to skip grind is still ptw because you get more options than other players.
If that counts then in-game rendered intros on first launch running in 720p and you can't change video/display settings until after the game finally gives you control.
I played Assassin's Creed Origins during a free weekend a few years ago and it automatically set its own graphics settings and dumped you into the game without being able to access the menu so it looked like my screen was covered in patrolium jelly half the time. About an hour into the game when I could finally access the game menu I learned why. It set all settings to their absolute highest but resolution scaling was enabled so it was trying to render graphics my PC couldn't handle then internally reducing the resolution down to 360p or so. Once I dialed in settings that my computer could actually handle without resolution scaling it looked a million times better
To hide poor frame rate, that's why. Motion blur was popularized on consoles by AAA studios that wanted everything to look really pretty, but couldn't sustain a stable frame rate during rapid motion.
If you have the FPS to afford it, turn that shit off.
even worse when its part of a setup where you are escorting but you have team members with missions that they can't do and you have to do them in a ship that is slow and you have to fly long distances to do what they were supposed to do but get back to defend your escort. Yes im talking about y-wing missions in the x-wing game.
This is way common. Biggest offender recently was gears of war remake #2 with the loudest chainsaw noise you could imagine in the opening credits/developer logo
Ancient history now but Black&White 1. "Now you know how to rotate the camera to the left. Next let's see if you can rotate it to the right!"
In the game's defence it was still early in the 3D era and there probably was a number of players who had never navigated a free camera in that environment before. Still rage inducing though.
"Ah a cutscene, time to drink some wa FUCK"
It's gotten to the point where in games which pull this stuff I wait until the cutscene is over, then pause, then drink. And in games which don't, I'm usually a bit anxious anyways, just in case they suddenly start pulling out the QTEs.
Yeah but if you lose to a boss you have to start from the beginning again. I am not very good at rogue lites, I’m slow to learn how bosses work, and I wish there was a way to save before a boss so I could try multiple times with the same build.
I understand why the mechanic is there, it’s still a mind blowing game, loved it and loved Hades II as well.
Unskippable cut scenes, especially before a boss. I want to play on hard difficulty, which means I WILL die to bosses. Do not force me to watch that shit 5+ times or I'm out like trout.
Something that hasn't been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay...
Case in point, unmodded Skyrim's legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation'd...)
Or when you can't beat the lvl1 monster easily because the scaling is so aggressive you never get to feel more powerful. Ohh look I spent 6hours on a side quest to get the legendary Sword that can cut anything from dragon scale to ghosts - yet it can't get through thug#1's leather shield?
Skyrim and Oblivion difficulty is very stupid. If you change difficulty after playing a character for 100hr it isn't so bad, but if you want to start out on the hardest difficulty, I'd say it's actually impossible to play unless you have some kind of cheese tactic. Shooting a barbarian for like 1/100th of their health bar? And they one-shot you? What the hell kind of design is this?
I'm speaking from experience, I have tried... To give them some benefit of the doubt, designing a good difficulty variation is difficult (pun not intended), even games like the original Hades which has a very extensive difficulty modification system still gets flack for it
I think it would be a relatively easy problem to solve, I think being one-shot on the highest difficulty is expected, but making every enemy a damage-sponge is both anti-fun and poor game design.
Just change the scaling - damage scaling is fine as-is, health scaling needs to be drastically reduced. If a barbarian gets one-shot on the easiest difficulty, having it take like, five shots whilst also increasing the risk should be fine.
Agreed. Everyone should take notes on how jedi: fallen order did difficulty. Sure, it did a bit of simple stat adjusting, but it also did things like increasing enemy aggression
Atomfall was so good for its difficulty settings menu. They gave you soo many options. You could really tweak out a lot of parts you didn't like in the game but make the difficulty whatever you wanted it to be.
The kill animations in Skyrim are the worst. Doesn't matter how well you've done in the fight or how many potions you have, if the enemy manages to get you to a certain level of health you're killed instantly with no way to stop it. It's insulting to be killed like that by a random bandit that was lucky enough to drop you low enough before you could heal.
For me it probably is. I do not like many of the live-service game mechanics (limited stamina, gambling, microtransactions) but at least I get why; the one I mentioned just feels lazy and would make otherwise good games feel unplayable
I love how the one game where this would make sense, FEAR (where the enemy is a clone army controlled by a single psychic commander), is also famous for how well the AI communicates with each other. They shout out detailed tactical chatter and announce their current moves even though it's pointless due to them all sharing the same mind.
And if they have some kind of shared vision because of technology or telepathy, then make it hurt them them when one goes down.
Or make it make sense, like they have to spend a turn to contact the others, or they shout to alert other NPCs, but that just means there know there's a threat in this general area, not "we now have magic GPS for the next five minutes, and then I guess it must have been the wind."
Are there any good examples of AI in games that do the opposite of this? Off the top of my head, pretty much every game works like this, I imagine having every NPC having its own vision & memory would become very complex to manage.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is like this. Usually if someone spots you wanting to attack you, they'll yell or something similar to get others attention. But other times you'll have someone notice you, they'll walk over and alert their buddies first and then they all come after you
Probably encumberance, almost certainly the single most ignored rule in rpgs.
But honorable mention goes to old school AC/THAC0 - the mechanics were originally for modern-era battleship game where armor class referred to size. Using the smallness of boats to model the defensive power of better armor was never going to produce sensible results. THAC0 was always unweildy at the table, slowed play, and turned combat into a chorus of "uggghhhh does a 13 hit?" "Ugh.... no."
Encumbrance makes a lot of sense in the context of old D&D, progression was tied to how much treasure you could get out of a dungeon. It also works well in survival-type games where resource management is a key mechanic. But like many facets of old D&D it is applied widely with no consideration.
I also think that like a lot of old d&d, it just wasn't very good.
Having an encumbrance system isn't necessarily bad - there are plenty of design goals it can support, as you point out. But counting out every pound and ounce has always been more work than most players want to do.
I don't think that I can give the worst, but I can give some that I did not enjoy.
Invisible teleporters. Some old RPGs --- like the D&D Gold Box games --- came without an auto-mapping feature. Part of the game was, as one played along, manually creating a map on graph paper. This in-and-of-itself was somewhat time-consuming, and if one made a mistake or got turned around, it could be hard to fix one's map. A particularly obnoxious feature to complicate this was that sometimes, there'd be unmarked teleporters to move you to another place on the map without notice, and you had to figure out that this had happened. Very annoying. I didn't like this mechanic.
Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature. Some strategy games do this. The idea here is to force you to think in real time, and not permit you to just pause and think about things. Problem is, even if one agrees with this, in the real world, sometimes you need to answer the door or use the toilet. Not a good idea.
In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one's precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There's some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don't think that it's necessary --- a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don't really like situations where it's just added for the sake of being there.
I've got kids, if I'm playing while they're up I have to be able to drop everything on a dime to go stop them from managing to kill themselves because that happens about 3x an evening
There's several games I'd like to play but simply don't because I cannot pause. Like I get it, single player is just booting up the multiplayer server without networking so only you can join, but also it's only a single player so they should be able to pause the engine whenever they want to
In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one's precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There's some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don't think that it's necessary --- a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don't really like situations where it's just added for the sake of being there.
I hate this mechanic so much. If a player couldn't win with the powerup, all taking it away does is consign them to a slow death spiral. This made sense when shmups were quarter-munching arcade machines, but this "feature" remained a staple of the genre even after it moved to home consoles.
And for a non-shmup example, Super Star Wars was another major offender. The game was incredibly hard even with a maxed out weapon. Dying reverted you to the basic blaster, cutting your damage output to a fraction of what it was and making it nearly impossible to get past the tougher boss fights if you didn't win on the first try. It's often considered one of the hardest games of all time, and I'm willing to bet this mechanic is the main reason why.
Both Control and the dogshit Avengers game had these upgrade systems where you were constantly bombarded with pickups that offered inane benefits like “2.5% increase to headshot damage for 3 seconds after taking damage while in midair” and you spent half the game managing your goddamn upgrades and the limited upgrade slots instead of having fun. It got to the point where I was relieved when I DIDN’T get any upgrades after a battle.
Oh yeah, I really liked Control and recommended someone else play it. He didn't make it far and I asked why not and he said the upgrade system and the crafting... and I was like what crafting?
He said the way you turn figments or whatever into upgrades or whatever. And I was like "oh yeah, that rings a bell... I just didn't do any of that".
I don't always have this power, but in this case I was apparently able to ignore entire chunks of the game and enjoy what was left. So I have a weird skewed view of the game 😛
In Control the only good ones are increasing damage, increasing magazine size, and lowering the cooldowns on your psychic powers. You're basicslly better off just using the throw power than using the service weapon, even on bosses.
The game is phenomenal especially the beginning few hours. I'm talking pure magic, fucking bottled lightning and should not be missed by anyone!!!
It's acquired skills you get from items throughout the game, but unless you're playing on hard(which normal feels like in some of the boss fights, but that's another discussion) you really don't need to obsess about optimizing them. Maelle gets dumb fucking strong later in later chapters.
The issue in question is that you unlock points that allow you to use more/better upgrades. Each upgrade has an ability and some stat buffs. The higher level upgrades have better buffs, but are more expensive to use. So there's a bit of micromanaging which upgrades your characters use for certain battles, since you may want certain abilities, but don't care about the stat buffs they provide.
Early game upgrades can provide some useful skills throighout the game, but may have much weaker buffs than later upgrades. It can get tedious.
Fortunately, if that stuff sounds like a pain to you, the game has an easy mode which makes most of that stuff much less relevant.
Nah, the upgrades you get are all useful, the biggest problem is the UI for wading through them. It needs more options. Rather than just Offensive/Defensive/Support, I want filters like “base attack” “interacts with burning” “triggered by parrying” and so on.
Anything that is 100% chance and just wasting time, with no meaningful way for the player to influence the odds. For example, how fishing is implemented in some MMOs like ESO: you can eat a buff food and use the correct bait for the water, but beyond that you're just waiting in agony until the random timer dings. Then you do that 12 times before moving to the next hole, etc. "Waiting" isn't an enjoyable mechanic.
Damn that game is so good... The mechanics might fall apart if they were expanded too much in the wrong direction, but outside of the start, it's paced well, written well, has a good sound track, etc... excellent.
Though FUCK the RNG for having to catch an aberration before the game truly starts.
Good point! I suggest fishing spears if only to grief the players who are begging for spears as a melee weapon in ESO.
But more seriously: a spear mechanic at least would have an element of skill to aim at the fish and account for refraction - or something. Not just pure chance.
Fishing is one of those things were you should not really need to do it and by that mean it should not provide something useful you can't get elsewhere. Have fisherman selling fish hey caught and have other things dropping whatever else comes from it.
I don't mind that fishing exists and I understand many people enjoy it as a kind of zen. I personally would enjoy it more if it were more engaging.
You're right, I could just choose to ignore it if it has nothing of value to me.
However, at least in ESO, tons of achievements and rewards are locked behind fishing activities. I could ignore their as well, but I would prefer if I could enjoy a more engaging fishing mini game (like their scrying is tedious but at least you're actively doing something).
QTE, including those i have to align those bar that goes left and right, or those tap a button quickly, in any game that isn't point and click adventure game. It's not fun in God of War, and it's not fun in Dying Light.
Also extreme hand-holding tutorial that force you to click button or do certain action else your progression is refused. This happened a lot in mobile game, which i basically refuse to play.
When you can't dodge because you're charging an attack/doing a combo/whatever. If I'm attacking one enemy, and I see another one about to attack me from behind, I want to be able to get out of the way, not be stuck in an attack animation until I get hit
This doesn't bother me at all. It's kinda weird that games are often expected to give 100% of their content to average investment players. Leave some meat on the bone for the tryhards!
Hey hey, me too. I mostly just don't want too many "redo this whole game again" stuff, unless there's a reason (split path, etc). A stress filled second run is not a good reason.
Upgrades that cannot be changed. Don't force me to replay the entire game just to see what a different upgrade does. I'm my opinion, all games should let you rebuild your character pretty much whenever. I think BG3 did a good job of it with Withers. The price is low enough to not feel like a burden but high enough to not encourage you to cheese it. The only small downside of it is that Withers is technically an optional character you could miss. I think mechanics like this should just be baked in.
When the game progresses naturally, and as you move through the game, you always find yourself in the right spot to overcome the next obstacle, that's great. But the second I have to stop progressing through the game and go spend 6 hours killing goblins, I'm done.
All the ones gacha games employ: daily stamina, grind to get some currency, power creep the characters, create content that can only be cleared with premium characters etc.
Outside of this, I hate when you have levelled up a character immensely to the point where an errant sneeze could wipe out half a city, and then you flick a boss to defeat their lineage then lose in the cutscene.
I know the reasons why this is done, but I would vastly prefer shorter but more fleshed out game experiences.
A shorter story that is actually repayable naturally where you can do so many things and there are not cutscene losses.
Speaking of which, things like
::: spoiler spoiler
The Secret Ending
:::
in Cyberpunk could be so much better if they just didn't fucking exist.
I don't want to have to read some guide to know that a a piece of content I really value will exist.
Its not fun to me to have notable portions of a game cut out such that you have to be a wiki reader.
These combined would make a game with a more stress free experience where you can truly just experience the world and not be too fussed about if you stuffed up a certain ending tree etc.
Games with inventories where they treat a single gem or a flower petal as occupying the same space in your rucksack as a pair of boots.
Guys, we go back to Ultima 7 with the key ring, the problem was solved along fucking time ago. Stop being lazy and have gem sacks, crafting bags, keyrings, etc for small items.
Limited inventory space in an otherwise unrealistic RPG.
You're telling me I can carry six two-handed weapons and 500lbs of gold, but seven is just too much?! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Specifically, this especially sucks when the inventory is a grid, like in the Diablo series, or Grim Dawn, or WoW, FFXIV or... many other MMOs.
especially when you can spend real money to alleviate the artificial limitation they fucking designed in to the game.
It's so unnecessary and these days absolutely makes me instantly not care to continue playing. FUCK artificial limitations that don't have clear, valid reasons.
I'm here to play a game, not Inventory Management Simulator 33.45
Want a piece of equipment for your character? Well spend daily currency to get one that regenerates over a day. Oops rng God hates you and you got +Def for a character that wants +Atk, better luck tomorrow/next week... Oops it's still not your week +Hp this time.
Ah another one - Forced stealth sections where you can't be detected at all. Especially in a game where stealth is optional or not even a thing you can really do normally.
Probably the Enemy Boxer from Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. Canonically he is a mechanic but they don’t even give him the wrench ability which isn’t even that special of an ability, and then he dies like a wimp with his plastic still-alive head getting chopped off by the plane that he’s supposed to be repairing. An idiot who would punch an anvil three times in a row deserves that sort of graceless demise.
Unchangeable difficulty settings. Worse, games that offer you to lower it and don't warn you that they're going to lock it at the lower setting. Resident Evil Village did that to me. Last time I posted about this someone said it warms you, so I guess they changed it.
Weight makes sense from a story perspective. Even a top-spec fighter can't carry four zweihanders and 500 food rations.
But even the 1-STR mage who might have a legitimate carry weight limit of 2kg, should not be told "you can only carry 3 different types of 10-gram herb." Especially if he's allowed to carry 200 units of any one of the types. Give me anything resembling a viable story-based reason for that.
But selling a solution to that is a very popular monetization paradigm for MMOs, so it stays.
If we leave realism aside for a moment, though, the difference is that:
a carry slot limit restricts how many distinct kinds of items you can have, whereas
a carry weight limit moreso forces you to leave behind duplicates of items or to e.g. make a choice between heavy armor vs. having auxiliary items.
It depends on the game what's more fitting for the overall design, but yeah, ultimately you want to prevent the player from optimizing the fun out of the game.
Having very heavy armor or dozens of healing potions can be boring, since there's no risk anymore.
But having one of each different kind of item can also kill the fun, because having the perfect solution for every situation is just as boring.
I'd argue that rather than carry weight, the real culprit is shops where you can sell stuff. If you knew right away that junk is not worth picking up, because you can't sell it, then you wouldn't pick it up. And then the carry weight limit can do what it was designed for, which is to make you strategize what equipment to bring along.
Yeah, and you'd often get a separate junk inventory, along with a one-click button to sell everything from there. I guess, at least it was an attempt to solve the problem...
All the junk in fallout? I know it's worthless, but my compulsion is to loot everything.
I'm not opposed to those that want that mechanic, but it would be nice for there to simply be a toggle to disable it.
I can't stand going into a dungeon and on the third chest having to decide what to throw away this time.
I'm ALWAYS going to have a max inventory, it's stupid not to play a game without it. If I can carry 10 healing items, I will just in case. But it also means at every single drop, I have to go into my inventory and decide what to toss. Or if to toss. It's takes up time when want to do the fun things in the game. And it makes me have to constantly make decisions and think if this item is better than one I have, and if so what do I get rid of. Do I get rid of healing potions or mana potions? When is the next time I can sell this? How much is this worth?
I play games to play games. Not to micromanage inventory.
Okay, but make crafting mats 0 at least or have a second "hoard" inventory that doesn't count but is also inaccessible in combat or something. Just give us a way to clean out a dungeon without having to do a bunch of time wasting bullshit.
I played until they patches the bug where if you equipped/unequipped gear that affected carry weight fast enough it would't remove the effect every time and you could max it out.
Also, I hated that your stash was also limited by carry weight.
I'll mention God of War and its final battle. You spend the entire game building skill with one set of weapons, then the end of the game pushes a brand new set of moves on you. I never did finish the game because of that BS.
Taking control away from the player for stupid bullshit.
Dragon's Dogma 2 had this to the most extreme level I had ever seen. Random NPCs can initiate dialogue without you hitting a prompt (and they can appear anywhere, even in the middle of a cave full of monsters). Your companions will sometimes high five you, and it just forces you into an animation that it didn't prompt you for. There is an actual boss fight in the game that is literally a cutscene of someone else fighting it.
That example also made me think of Elder Scrolls games, but I was thinking about how in the case of guards running up to detain you, forcing you into dialogue is legitimate. But yeah, the Skyrim couriers, not so much!
I think it's real time? After oblivion all are real time, which is why in FO4 you can kind of walk away any time(but you have to struggle a bit for the control to respond)
If you disable the dialogue camera, which is on by default, yeah it just continues playing.
FYI: There is a bug that still exists in FO4 with disabling the dialogue camera for the initial scene when entering Diamond City as well as returning to the baseball guy (Moe something?) after grabbing his requested items where if you initiate dialogue while in power armor, the whole conversation locks up and you're stuck unable to do anything except reload a save. I just leave it on now, cuz even the unofficial patch does not fix this.
There is an actual boss fight in the game that is literally a cutscene of someone else fighting it.
That reminds me of Fable 2, where the worst character in the entire series (who you're forced to ally with) will kill-steal the final boss if you don't shoot them during their speech.
I would love an online/offline mmo use a modified version of the companion system were your character could be marked for people to use as a companion and also integrate in the gambit system from final fantasy so you can config how your character behaves maybe even with quips.
Been playing Dark Deity (a Fire Emblem clone) lately and instead of permadeath, it reduces a random stat by 10% permanently. Can't say I'm a fan. Just have a permadeath mode and a regular mode.
Missable or multiplayer-only achievements. Or the ones that force you to replay the game.
Ghost of Yōtei is doing it well. Everything is available at all times after the main story is completed in a single game. I could think of a few possible achievements they could have created that would be missable but I'm glad they didn't.
GTA5 has a lot of multiplayer achievements I could never get because I hate GTA Online.
Talos Principle 2 has at least two achievement that each needs a replay to the end and you have to follow a specific path of talking to characters that you don't know upfront if you're not looking online for it. So if you're trying this without a guide you might end up replaying it more than twice. That's shitty.
Completing botw became more of a chore than anything else. I couldn't get all the way through tears of the kingdom. The chores in that one just compounded. I managed to somehow light up the entire underworld and yet my gear was too fucking terrible to face the end bosses.
Botw was very cool at times, but it had a few things that made it utterly frustrating to play. The weapons breaking and having to watch Link go "uhh eeefff eeeff ooof" on the side of a cliff for hours was just painful and purposeless.
To your point, it seems like no game can manage to have an expansive, explorable world that's actually rewarding to explore. Maybe there is an exception out there but I haven't encountered it.
Elden Ring has done it best so far, particularly the dlc, but it also obliterated the replay value compared to other souls games with how much empty traversal it adds and now that you can go anywhere you know what's available and wind up googling where things are instead of making do with your limited options as you go.
I feel like The Witcher 2 had a good balance. You're instanced in a smallish but very meaningfully designed map that's big enough to feel like you're actually exploring a bit, but small enough to actually be hand-designed and decorated and feel like it too
The indie game Sable had brilliant climbing mechanics. You have limited climbing like in most games, but you literally don't need the extended climbing range for almost the entirety of the main game except for like one or two not-required missions, you only really need it to collect all of the collectables that extend your climbing range. You know how I know? I didn't find the way to extend climbing range until like the very end of the game. Somehow completely skipped over it!
Games that have long scripted sections you can't skip and sometimes even save. Next level, you'll have to move around and answer questions so can't even go take a shit.
Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk both had sections like that. Loved the games, hated that bullshit.
The whole section between the takemura junkyard cutscene and waking up in your appartment doesn't allow saving, however iirc when the game came out it was the ENTIRE heist sequence once you got to yorinobus room.
All I can think of is maybe at the start of Phantom Liberty? On first arrival at Dogtown you were locked in to a string of missions for a while but I don't remember if you couldn't pause or save because I did all of that part in one go anyway.
Holding a button to do anything/everything. I can see the logic of where it may be useful, but it doesn't need to be used for everything. So damn annoying.
*Oh, and similarly, forcing excessive submenus to do basic things, like continue a save from the main menu. That should be one, maybe two button presses, not 4+ along with a confirmation. I'll never understand games with stuff like that.
No Man's Sky is a repeat offender for both of those things. How they've released constant major updates for a decade but never taken the time to fix their terrible user interface is one of life's great mysteries.
Poorly done procedural generation where it's a waste of time to explore. The first Remnant was pretty bad about this, with small setpieces scattered throughout the levels that looked interesting but usually only contained basic enemies and one or two empty pots. Filling out the map was a chore that was almost never worth the effort - almost never because sometimes there was a unique drop hidden in a level just to screw over anyone who got sick of fighting through hundreds of empty buildings and decided to stick to the main path.
Bethesda's random leveled loot is another contender for worst mechanic. It was always fun picking the lock on a master-level chest deep in a dungeon only to find thirteen coins and a wooden spoon inside.
"Some may call this junk. Me, I call it treasure." could be a line from their design document.
For board games, not having a firm way to end the game. A lot of Steve Jackson games have this problem where the mechanics of the game mean a lot of people will prevent people from winning the game , which usually lengthens the game as people have more power to keep others from winning than winning themselves.
One of the worst game mechanics ever found in a game was where the enemy got harder as you gained levels. The same enemy. It basically defeated the value of having more levels. I think it was Oblivion Skyrim where I found this, particularly annoying.
Survival crafting. I spend my real life days trying to keep up on sheltering and feeding myself. I don’t want to “relax” by punching trees to make a fire to cook a bird I punched to death.
The pervasiveness of this in every game has limited the content I engage with the last 10 or so years. Everyone started chasing that Minecraft money and now it’s Ubi-fied into just about every mainstream title.
I don’t want to forge new weapons. I want to find them in a chest or earn them by killing a boss. I have bounced off of so many games the moment they ask me to learn a system of crafting. Keep that in it’s own genre and stop padding games out with repetitive busy work.
"Here's a rare weapon dropped by this boss! But wait, you need to be at least level 30 to use it, and you're still on level 2."
I went out of my way to repeatedly grind and kill this late game boss during early game, just give me my reward for not following the stupid linear progression
Not really the worst, but my hot take of something I don't like: puzzles rather than problems. By that I mean puzzles have one correct solution and everything else is wrong and doesn't work, while with a problem you're given some tools and an obstacle and just let loose. It's so much more satisfying to find your own solution that it is to reach the end and realize you were being sneakily handheld through it to make sure you found the only possible way through. I've done a few good problems where I reach the end, then immediately reload the save from before and try some different routes just to see if it works.
Puzzles do have their place though, especially in tutorials.
Silksong has me screaming over them, 10 - 20 minutes of walking and one too many smacks at the end ruins it. And then there's the one that's also timed!
But to be fair, most of Silksong gets me yelling at the TV on the regular! I love it and hate it!
No natural health/mana regeneration. I hate games where you need potions to survive or are limited in your spell usage just because you do not enough mana which was finished earlier.
Europa Universalis 4 forced historical events while also advertising it as a sandbox. For example: no matter how stable you are as netherlands. As soon as you end your golden age your country will go into a civil war that if you have collonies you can barely get out of. Because "well it was in history like that"
Since all the obvious answers have been covered, I'm gonna dig deep on a genre nobody but me even plays anymore anyway.
Character-based asymmetry in versus puzzle games. It's never been remotely balanced, and I don't believe it ever could be.
Suppose I put you in charge of developing a balance patch for Puyo Puyo Fever, Puzzle Bobble 3, Magical Drop, Meteos, etc, you could just name any other puzzle game that has this. What changes would you make? What changes could you even try to make?
If you look at something like a fighting game, characters have large movesets, and every move has a bunch of variables attached: startup, active, recovery, hitstun, damage, meter gain. Which means there's a lot of surface area for developers to adjust and fine-tune until the cast hopefully feels balanced enough. Even if they don't get it right on the first try, they can gather data from players and use that information to figure out what needs to be patched.
Puzzle games have little to no room to even try to do this. So when you try to give character choice a mechanical effect on gameplay, but they only do one thing like a dropset or garbage pattern, there are almost no meaningful buffs or nerfs that can be handed out when it turns out that Void Hole is kinda good and Skeleton T kinda isn't.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix famously tried, and, well, an attempt was made but it ultimately couldn't do all that much. The tiers got shuffled around slightly, but it's still Ken Fighter.
Enchant weapons/armor to +x%. It usually companies Pay2Win items that you can use to have a 100% chance of upgrading, or at least not breaking your armor.
I kinda disagree. Sure, if it's just thrown on top with no real thought to it, it's bad. But it's possible to build around durability to make it a core part of the game. Think Zelda BOTW and TOTK. Weapon durability is a central part of the combat gameplay loop in those games. There's plenty of weapons lying around, so you never really run out, and there are more details that mean you can actually use the system to your advantage (like how you deal massive damage on the breaking hit).
I literally quit playing botw and totk because of weapon durability. It adds nothing to the game except to make it possible I'm in an unwinnable boss fight because I forgot to bring more than five weapons. If I could use weapons for 5x as long it wouldn't have made me quit; I'd just not like that part of the game. But some weapons lasting only 3-5 hits is fucking ridiculous.
Funny because that's exactly the games I'm thinking of.
Granted I was trying to play the game on hard mode so that didn't help, but the system felt awful to me. There's a band of goblins, let me see if I have any weapons bad enough to be worth spending on them.
Maybe not the worst, but I've been playing old RPGs and I really hate mandatory loss fights in late game or NG+. Radiata Stories was a fantastic game but I was bonkers powerful on my second playthrough yet somehow lost a fight to a humongous chud asshole for plot reasons. Rare misstep in that games story, honestly.
Best example of subversion of that trope, though,b was in Dragon Quest 11. If you know, you know, but I won't spoil that, lol.
Fuck you gears of war for creating the trope of walking while dialogue is playing so you don't advance too fast. Just give me the fucking cutscene, you're not fooling anyone
I've got a time-traveling kick in the nuts prepared for whoever invented wall-humping for unmarked secrets. I first remember this from Wolfenstein 3D but I'm not sure if it existed before then.
You know when you are in the middle of a game's story and then you get caught or something wjd the enemy takes all your gear and you have to find your gear or fight to get it back? No screw that. So annoying.
And I'm the kind of player that does all sise quests before doing the main story so I can be OP and plow through the story. Just let me do that and don't take what I worked hard to get.
Hidden story trees or finicky story trees so you have to meticulously follow guides lest you get a bad end or miss a secret ending
Weapons that break.
No. Never. Stop doing it.
Shotguns that only are effective up to 10 ft
What game actually has shotguns act like real shotguns???
Loading screen ass tunnels or hallways or elevators.
We live in 2025. Evryone has Ssds and there are many ways to load as a player advances. Stop doing this 1990s shit.
Timers.
Just never find them fun
Forced heavy backtracking.
I'm not having fun, you're just wasting my time. Fuck you.
Unrelated puzzle mini games
Please stop adding worthless busy work into games. One of the first mods I added to Cyberpunk was just to remove the stupid breach protocol. It's not that its hard, it's not. It's just time wasting and annoying. Dispatch is another game with these for no reason. Fallout, Bioshock, fucking so many games have this shit.
Either I have the level to pick the fucking lock or I don't. I don't want to play some half assed unrealistic lockpicking sim for the equivalent of an hour by the time the game is done. It's like making you have to take each step for your character or breathe. Not the point.
Obviously all mtxs, goes without saying and marketting dark patterns like everything here.
Nerfing """OP""" things in single player power fantasy games.
Are you high? That's the fucking point!
Chance based loot.
Just no. I don't want to reload a dozen times to get the thing I want. It arguably exists in the world and I should just be able to go find it.
Loot.
Stop spreading this shit around making me have to waste time everywhere I go in order to be remotely optimally equipped.
Just say no to loot.
Healing should be on a cool down and have upgrades availible like in cyberpunk, Ammunition should be on enemies, cooldown or purchased
Weapons if loot able should be placed identically with no luck elements, or in exactly the stores they should be in.
I have a dislike for cutscenes. Often during gameplay, suddenly you lost control, often behavior is inconsistent, and you have to wait to be able to continue to play.
The half-life series shows how it can be done without. Story without losing control. Characters do their scripted behavior within the context of the world.
This is more game specific than anything else, but the slingshot rock from Dungeon Clawler. Temporarily destroys an item, uses the first item item it hits once, and then the next twice before disappearing. Doesn't bounce in a way I like.
I thought about my answer, since many mechanics I don't like can have good implementations, or at the very least are a sort of lesser of two evils kind of thing.
What I can't stand are tactical or RPG games with realtime or turn based combat option toggles. I play many games with one or the other and enjoy them, but when I play a game with both that can be toggled in options I always feel like neither setting feels perfectly right. The balance is always off no matter what. Understandable with game devs having to double the amount of work for creating combat and tuning items and it ends up feeling a little soggy every time.
I don't really know the name of the game mechanics, but when I was a kid I bought, with my saves, Halo Wars for Xbox 360, the worst investment I have done after ChainLink cryto purchase, well as a newbie I listened to my friend how Halo was the best game they have ever played!!!, as the you all may guess, the were talking about Halo 4.
Since then I am GOW fan. Halo wars had a poor mechanics for me 12 years ago, maybe today could be a game I would like.
The computer's job is to do math, not mine as a player. Any game that exposes it's math to the extent that a player is incentivized to do math is a failure of game design.
Can confirm. A pretty significant amount of the time I've put into that game has been doing calculations on paper and then redoing them again after they turn out wrong.
Not OP but Kerbal space program is far better when you have a mod that calculates delta V for you. Otherwise you have to manually recalculate everything every single time you make a small change to your rocket. And without knowing the delta V you have no hope of reaching many of the planets in the game
Oh don't forget MechJeb. Some call it cheating, but ain't nobody in the real world docking 2 craft in orbit by hand, so why should I be required to do so in my space-lite simulation game? Plus if your craft is weird enough (or your mission has become funky enough) you still have to do some things manually because MechJeb can't quite figure it out
I'm glad for you, and I'm happy to use math in every day life, but for me its work.
Many games have this problem for me, but take any game with items that have numerical stats as the only way to differentiate them. So to compare two items the player has to look at the numbers. To me that moment is work, not fun. I prefer a graphical or audio representation of the difference. Maybe color or size indicates the gameplay difference. Something like that makes it more enjoyable to me.
I don't like durability mechanics when its clearly there just to waste your time or money or whatever. Any game that makes you do more hiking to repair benches than fighting is either getting a thumbs down or I'm going to download a mod.
It is a fine line, like in Minecraft durability obviously makes sense, so it makes sense that other games try to emulate that. But then look at Stardew Valley, one of the most popular mods is the one that stops fences from degrading because repairing them is tedious.
I would totally be up for requiring more resources to craft a tool to not have it degrade ever.
That's a great idea.
Can you make fences out of stone or metal, or just wood, in SV? Because I recall Harvest Moon DS allowed you to make stone fences, which were a lot more likely to survive hurricanes and snowstorms
Yeah you can make stone, iron, and hardwood fences too. Only real difference is that they last longer respectively, but you still need to eventually replace them. Which is still kinda tedious.
Breath of the Wild is generally pretty good about letting you explore your own way. For example, the exposition ghost at the start explicitly acknowledges you could go straight to the final boss after leaving the tutorial area if you want, and there are plenty of ways a determined player can reach areas faster than the typical progression routes would take them.
But my goodness the pitiful weapon durability made me want to avoid combat. I distinctly remember coming across a white lionel relatively early and determining I shouldn't bother trying to fight simply because I didn't have enough weapons to get through its health bar.
Yup. I played through BotW always holding onto things I thought were good because the stupid durability mechanic made me hoard stuff.
When I started TotK I decided to turn durability off and see if I enjoyed more and I absolutely did. Made the game way better. The only thing that broke was some balancing around crafted weapons. For example you can take a stick and slap a horn on it and get a very powerful, but brittle, weapon. With durability off it just becomes a very powerful weapon, which pretty much matches or beats any proper weapon you can find. If you think that's too hacky you can just make a rule for yourself not to craft things like that.
Many games have gone through this and time and time again scarcity makes people not use things. In Witcher 2 you had to craft potions manually by collecting all the ingredients each time. In Witcher 3 they just replenish after a rest if you have alcohol on you. 2 is more realistic, but the work involved (and the fact that you had to drink them before combat started) made them too much of a pain and I just went without. In 3 you can simply use them and not worry.
I played BotW with 4x durability mod and it was soooo much better.
I expected to do the same for TotK, but the fusion system made things infinitely more durable than the breaking garbage weapons of BotW, so I didn’t have to mod durability in.
I built a self-repair skill mod for Fallout New Vegas specifically because I hated that shit.
These two mechanics conflct with one another way too often and it's immersion breaking every time.
Fuck, this annoys me so much. The new-ish sony games are awful with it (Spider-man and GoW at least), providing beautiful, intricate worlds and levels to explore, but if you aren't sprinting toward the next objective at every moment, it constantly bombards you with little nagging voicelines from npcs or even the main character themselves. I hate it.
Act 1 BG3 was pretty bad about this. I thought the tadpole plot was going to be resolved in Act 1!
It's very important that we find a healer or we're going to die! But also, you can only get one camp interaction per rest so take your time~
THAT'S NOT GOING TO WORK!
TRY SOMETHING ELSE!
USE THE TADPOLE!
First game that came to mind was RD2. I remember a mission at the beginning, where you're meant to clear out some Plinkertons from a house, and I remember one of the camp NPCs asking you to look around for supplies (or maybe something specific).
As soon as you're able to leave the area, Dutch starts screaming at you to hurry tf up. A friend and I will occasionally quote him when we're being jokingly impatient with one another: "C'MON ARTHUR, QUIT HORSIN' AROUN'! WE AIN'T GAHT ALL DAAAY!"
Insert real world money to continue/for advantage. Whether it's modern FTP with MTX or old school quarter eaters, it's poison to games.
Absofuckinglutely.
I also hate that gamers in general have been so cooked in mtxs they don't even realize that pay to skip grind is still ptw because you get more options than other players.
Not a mechanic i guess, but motion blur
If that counts then in-game rendered intros on first launch running in 720p and you can't change video/display settings until after the game finally gives you control.
I played Assassin's Creed Origins during a free weekend a few years ago and it automatically set its own graphics settings and dumped you into the game without being able to access the menu so it looked like my screen was covered in patrolium jelly half the time. About an hour into the game when I could finally access the game menu I learned why. It set all settings to their absolute highest but resolution scaling was enabled so it was trying to render graphics my PC couldn't handle then internally reducing the resolution down to 360p or so. Once I dialed in settings that my computer could actually handle without resolution scaling it looked a million times better
God I can't stand it. It's one of those things like "Why do I need that, my eyes can already do that"
To hide poor frame rate, that's why. Motion blur was popularized on consoles by AAA studios that wanted everything to look really pretty, but couldn't sustain a stable frame rate during rapid motion.
If you have the FPS to afford it, turn that shit off.
Escort missions. Specifically when the person you are escorting is as sharp as a bag of hammers.
And they move very, very slowly...
Or, worse, they're very fast and just run headlong into death...
Or even worse, they move slightly slower than your run speed but slightly faster than your walk speed
This one. What the fuck, devs?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!
even worse when its part of a setup where you are escorting but you have team members with missions that they can't do and you have to do them in a ship that is slow and you have to fly long distances to do what they were supposed to do but get back to defend your escort. Yes im talking about y-wing missions in the x-wing game.
Microtransactions - the answer always has been and always will be microtransactions.
Truly.
For multiplayer games, I would rather subscribe to updates than have mtxs in any capacity.
Of course they never offer this though because the mtxs combined with dark patterns work better.
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Unskippable intro levels that teach the control mechanics.
Bonus if you also can't access settings and it's stuck in a stupid resolution or something.
Make sure the volume could win you a court case for blowing your fucking ears out and I'm there
My favorite is Killing Floor 2 which doesn't look at your volume setting in the config file until AFTER the intro videos and the menu has loaded.
This is way common. Biggest offender recently was gears of war remake #2 with the loudest chainsaw noise you could imagine in the opening credits/developer logo
Truly. I won't even think about starting a game without looking at the options menu.
Ancient history now but Black&White 1. "Now you know how to rotate the camera to the left. Next let's see if you can rotate it to the right!"
In the game's defence it was still early in the 3D era and there probably was a number of players who had never navigated a free camera in that environment before. Still rage inducing though.
Unless they’re really well integrated. The first 40-60% of Portal is a tutorial. You just don’t notice because it’s just the game.
I love how for a chunk of Portal 2 you're playing through the exact same chambers from Portal 1
Pay to win.
Permanently loosing a treasure that you can only get once because your pocket is full.
QTE, especially when they're randomly inserted into an otherwise action/skill based game.
Or to force you to pay attention during what is essentially a cutscene
"Ah a cutscene, time to drink some wa FUCK" It's gotten to the point where in games which pull this stuff I wait until the cutscene is over, then pause, then drink. And in games which don't, I'm usually a bit anxious anyways, just in case they suddenly start pulling out the QTEs.
I discovered recently that a lot of games allow you to disable qte. It usually buried in the accessibility options
Dying Light, I'm looking at you...
Mmmhm
Very few checkpoints or save options. I don’t have time to try to beat something if there is like 20 mins of playtime from the last checkpoint.
And then you stumble into an hour long cinematic.
Fuck that, Kojima should have made movies instead of games.
Don’t play Hades then
Haha, I was tempted to mention it’s different if it’s rouge like.
Ironically, hades is one of my favourite games of all time.
Also, it saves at the end of each encounter, making it very easy to stop after a few mins.
You can save in like any room if you need to quit and come back
Yeah but if you lose to a boss you have to start from the beginning again. I am not very good at rogue lites, I’m slow to learn how bosses work, and I wish there was a way to save before a boss so I could try multiple times with the same build.
I understand why the mechanic is there, it’s still a mind blowing game, loved it and loved Hades II as well.
Stat/EXP loss on death.
Unskippable cut scenes, especially before a boss. I want to play on hard difficulty, which means I WILL die to bosses. Do not force me to watch that shit 5+ times or I'm out like trout.
Something that hasn't been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay...
Case in point, unmodded Skyrim's legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation'd...)
Or when you can't beat the lvl1 monster easily because the scaling is so aggressive you never get to feel more powerful. Ohh look I spent 6hours on a side quest to get the legendary Sword that can cut anything from dragon scale to ghosts - yet it can't get through thug#1's leather shield?
The borderland series is the worst for this. Boss fights just mean you have to continuously shoot the enemy for 10-15 mins.
Skyrim and Oblivion difficulty is very stupid. If you change difficulty after playing a character for 100hr it isn't so bad, but if you want to start out on the hardest difficulty, I'd say it's actually impossible to play unless you have some kind of cheese tactic. Shooting a barbarian for like 1/100th of their health bar? And they one-shot you? What the hell kind of design is this?
I'm speaking from experience, I have tried... To give them some benefit of the doubt, designing a good difficulty variation is difficult (pun not intended), even games like the original Hades which has a very extensive difficulty modification system still gets flack for it
I think it would be a relatively easy problem to solve, I think being one-shot on the highest difficulty is expected, but making every enemy a damage-sponge is both anti-fun and poor game design.
Just change the scaling - damage scaling is fine as-is, health scaling needs to be drastically reduced. If a barbarian gets one-shot on the easiest difficulty, having it take like, five shots whilst also increasing the risk should be fine.
Agreed. Everyone should take notes on how jedi: fallen order did difficulty. Sure, it did a bit of simple stat adjusting, but it also did things like increasing enemy aggression
Atomfall was so good for its difficulty settings menu. They gave you soo many options. You could really tweak out a lot of parts you didn't like in the game but make the difficulty whatever you wanted it to be.
The kill animations in Skyrim are the worst. Doesn't matter how well you've done in the fight or how many potions you have, if the enemy manages to get you to a certain level of health you're killed instantly with no way to stop it. It's insulting to be killed like that by a random bandit that was lucky enough to drop you low enough before you could heal.
For me it probably is. I do not like many of the live-service game mechanics (limited stamina, gambling, microtransactions) but at least I get why; the one I mentioned just feels lazy and would make otherwise good games feel unplayable
Yes.
Where one enemy sees you and now all their friends somehow knows where you are
I love how the one game where this would make sense, FEAR (where the enemy is a clone army controlled by a single psychic commander), is also famous for how well the AI communicates with each other. They shout out detailed tactical chatter and announce their current moves even though it's pointless due to them all sharing the same mind.
And if they have some kind of shared vision because of technology or telepathy, then make it hurt them them when one goes down.
Or make it make sense, like they have to spend a turn to contact the others, or they shout to alert other NPCs, but that just means there know there's a threat in this general area, not "we now have magic GPS for the next five minutes, and then I guess it must have been the wind."
Are there any good examples of AI in games that do the opposite of this? Off the top of my head, pretty much every game works like this, I imagine having every NPC having its own vision & memory would become very complex to manage.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is like this. Usually if someone spots you wanting to attack you, they'll yell or something similar to get others attention. But other times you'll have someone notice you, they'll walk over and alert their buddies first and then they all come after you
One of the Splinter Cells showed you a ghost of the last position you were seen. Enemies acted as if you were last seen there.
I could understand it if the enemies communicate somehow, like relaying your location
Probably encumberance, almost certainly the single most ignored rule in rpgs.
But honorable mention goes to old school AC/THAC0 - the mechanics were originally for modern-era battleship game where armor class referred to size. Using the smallness of boats to model the defensive power of better armor was never going to produce sensible results. THAC0 was always unweildy at the table, slowed play, and turned combat into a chorus of "uggghhhh does a 13 hit?" "Ugh.... no."
Encumbrance makes a lot of sense in the context of old D&D, progression was tied to how much treasure you could get out of a dungeon. It also works well in survival-type games where resource management is a key mechanic. But like many facets of old D&D it is applied widely with no consideration.
I also think that like a lot of old d&d, it just wasn't very good.
Having an encumbrance system isn't necessarily bad - there are plenty of design goals it can support, as you point out. But counting out every pound and ounce has always been more work than most players want to do.
so many dm's would give bags of holding and such early on so that it became just keep track of what you get and sell what you don't.
At least THAC0 was fun to say!
Oh yeah that's true, it is somehow unreasonably fun to say.
We just called it TACO
Instead of having a high or low THAC0, do you say you have a soft or hard taco?
2E is still best. Fight me.
I would, but if we're using 2e it's gonna take hours.
I don't think that I can give the worst, but I can give some that I did not enjoy.
Invisible teleporters. Some old RPGs --- like the D&D Gold Box games --- came without an auto-mapping feature. Part of the game was, as one played along, manually creating a map on graph paper. This in-and-of-itself was somewhat time-consuming, and if one made a mistake or got turned around, it could be hard to fix one's map. A particularly obnoxious feature to complicate this was that sometimes, there'd be unmarked teleporters to move you to another place on the map without notice, and you had to figure out that this had happened. Very annoying. I didn't like this mechanic.
Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature. Some strategy games do this. The idea here is to force you to think in real time, and not permit you to just pause and think about things. Problem is, even if one agrees with this, in the real world, sometimes you need to answer the door or use the toilet. Not a good idea.
In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one's precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There's some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don't think that it's necessary --- a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don't really like situations where it's just added for the sake of being there.
Agreed. I can understand in MMOs, but if I'm the only one playing, the game should stop when I say stop.
At least make it an option in the accessibility settings if it's not "the developers' intended experience".
It took me forever to get used to it in sekiro.
I've got kids, if I'm playing while they're up I have to be able to drop everything on a dime to go stop them from managing to kill themselves because that happens about 3x an evening
There's several games I'd like to play but simply don't because I cannot pause. Like I get it, single player is just booting up the multiplayer server without networking so only you can join, but also it's only a single player so they should be able to pause the engine whenever they want to
I hate this mechanic so much. If a player couldn't win with the powerup, all taking it away does is consign them to a slow death spiral. This made sense when shmups were quarter-munching arcade machines, but this "feature" remained a staple of the genre even after it moved to home consoles.
And for a non-shmup example, Super Star Wars was another major offender. The game was incredibly hard even with a maxed out weapon. Dying reverted you to the basic blaster, cutting your damage output to a fraction of what it was and making it nearly impossible to get past the tougher boss fights if you didn't win on the first try. It's often considered one of the hardest games of all time, and I'm willing to bet this mechanic is the main reason why.
Bard's Tale had a street you could not completely walk down. At one point there's a teleporter that just sends you 3 squares back.
Sinister St.
Both Control and the dogshit Avengers game had these upgrade systems where you were constantly bombarded with pickups that offered inane benefits like “2.5% increase to headshot damage for 3 seconds after taking damage while in midair” and you spent half the game managing your goddamn upgrades and the limited upgrade slots instead of having fun. It got to the point where I was relieved when I DIDN’T get any upgrades after a battle.
Oh yeah, I really liked Control and recommended someone else play it. He didn't make it far and I asked why not and he said the upgrade system and the crafting... and I was like what crafting?
He said the way you turn figments or whatever into upgrades or whatever. And I was like "oh yeah, that rings a bell... I just didn't do any of that".
I don't always have this power, but in this case I was apparently able to ignore entire chunks of the game and enjoy what was left. So I have a weird skewed view of the game 😛
Lucky bastard. I feel like by the end of the game, many hours in, I was doing like all of 15% more damage.
In Control the only good ones are increasing damage, increasing magazine size, and lowering the cooldowns on your psychic powers. You're basicslly better off just using the throw power than using the service weapon, even on bosses.
Yeah that’s pretty close to how I treated it, but I still had to wade through mountains of garbage to get to useful upgrades.
Currently feeling something similar with expedition 33.
Oh no. I’ve heard such good things about that game. Say it ain’t so.
The game is phenomenal especially the beginning few hours. I'm talking pure magic, fucking bottled lightning and should not be missed by anyone!!!
It's acquired skills you get from items throughout the game, but unless you're playing on hard(which normal feels like in some of the boss fights, but that's another discussion) you really don't need to obsess about optimizing them. Maelle gets dumb fucking strong later in later chapters.
Well that’s good to know. Once I find several free days hidden under the couch, I intend to fire it up.
It's a solid game, definitely worth playing.
The issue in question is that you unlock points that allow you to use more/better upgrades. Each upgrade has an ability and some stat buffs. The higher level upgrades have better buffs, but are more expensive to use. So there's a bit of micromanaging which upgrades your characters use for certain battles, since you may want certain abilities, but don't care about the stat buffs they provide.
Early game upgrades can provide some useful skills throighout the game, but may have much weaker buffs than later upgrades. It can get tedious.
Fortunately, if that stuff sounds like a pain to you, the game has an easy mode which makes most of that stuff much less relevant.
Nah, the upgrades you get are all useful, the biggest problem is the UI for wading through them. It needs more options. Rather than just Offensive/Defensive/Support, I want filters like “base attack” “interacts with burning” “triggered by parrying” and so on.
That’s helpful, thanks.
Other than this nitpick, E33 is amazing; a work of art
Timer that can be skipped with paid currency.
I too was about to day Dungeon Keeper for mobile. What a wasted game.
KeeperFX is on gog. Grab that instead
You can just say "mobile".
2 sets of teeth, the first only lasting 1/9 of your life and the second being 8/9. 2/9, 7/9 would be much better or just 2/9, 4/9, 6/9.
Oh, hair falling out and all your joints hurting for 5/9 of your life kinda blows as well.
Loot boxes
For me: weapon durability.
Anything that is 100% chance and just wasting time, with no meaningful way for the player to influence the odds. For example, how fishing is implemented in some MMOs like ESO: you can eat a buff food and use the correct bait for the water, but beyond that you're just waiting in agony until the random timer dings. Then you do that 12 times before moving to the next hole, etc. "Waiting" isn't an enjoyable mechanic.
Why is fishing always a rod too? Let me setup a few 200m trotlines!
If I can't dredge the sea floor and destroy the ecosystem don't even talk to me about a game
Pretty sure played a fishing game called Dredge.
Fishing / cosmic horror, iirc.
You could lay traps and drag lines behind your boat as you progressed.
And discover the bizarre mystery of what happend to the last fisherman.
Damn that game is so good... The mechanics might fall apart if they were expanded too much in the wrong direction, but outside of the start, it's paced well, written well, has a good sound track, etc... excellent.
Though FUCK the RNG for having to catch an aberration before the game truly starts.
Good point! I suggest fishing spears if only to grief the players who are begging for spears as a melee weapon in ESO.
But more seriously: a spear mechanic at least would have an element of skill to aim at the fish and account for refraction - or something. Not just pure chance.
Warframe has spearfishing, and it's much more fun than any minigame using a rod.
Fishing in Torchlight. It's a fast ring qte - or you can throw dynamite in the whole and get all the fish instantly.
Fishing is one of those things were you should not really need to do it and by that mean it should not provide something useful you can't get elsewhere. Have fisherman selling fish hey caught and have other things dropping whatever else comes from it.
I don't mind that fishing exists and I understand many people enjoy it as a kind of zen. I personally would enjoy it more if it were more engaging.
You're right, I could just choose to ignore it if it has nothing of value to me.
However, at least in ESO, tons of achievements and rewards are locked behind fishing activities. I could ignore their as well, but I would prefer if I could enjoy a more engaging fishing mini game (like their scrying is tedious but at least you're actively doing something).
Relationship mechanics. If I give someone a pumpkin twice a week, they’re just going to be confused and pissed.
QTE, including those i have to align those bar that goes left and right, or those tap a button quickly, in any game that isn't point and click adventure game. It's not fun in God of War, and it's not fun in Dying Light.
Also extreme hand-holding tutorial that force you to click button or do certain action else your progression is refused. This happened a lot in mobile game, which i basically refuse to play.
When you can't dodge because you're charging an attack/doing a combo/whatever. If I'm attacking one enemy, and I see another one about to attack me from behind, I want to be able to get out of the way, not be stuck in an attack animation until I get hit
Not really a game mechanic, but as an achievement hunter I freakin' HATE speedrun-achievements. The longer the game, the worse it is
Yeah, silksong is impossible to 100% achievement unless you're the most hardcore achievement hunter.
I don't think the Speedrun is close to as hard as the steel soul 100% one
Is that achievement mean you have to do it 100% in that particular run? Kinda mean the 30hours 100% also pretty damn hard.
The steel soul is getting 100% without dying once. 35 hours for 100% is pretty doable with a route planned and some practice IMO
This doesn't bother me at all. It's kinda weird that games are often expected to give 100% of their content to average investment players. Leave some meat on the bone for the tryhards!
I semi ok with this if they aren't locking content behind try hardiness
How about an achievement per difficulty and doing the harder ones don't unlock the easier ones
Hey hey, me too. I mostly just don't want too many "redo this whole game again" stuff, unless there's a reason (split path, etc). A stress filled second run is not a good reason.
I blame resident evil for this
Upgrades that cannot be changed. Don't force me to replay the entire game just to see what a different upgrade does. I'm my opinion, all games should let you rebuild your character pretty much whenever. I think BG3 did a good job of it with Withers. The price is low enough to not feel like a burden but high enough to not encourage you to cheese it. The only small downside of it is that Withers is technically an optional character you could miss. I think mechanics like this should just be baked in.
Grinding.
When the game progresses naturally, and as you move through the game, you always find yourself in the right spot to overcome the next obstacle, that's great. But the second I have to stop progressing through the game and go spend 6 hours killing goblins, I'm done.
Stealth challenges on games that don't have stealth as a regular mechanic
Anything that makes you follow an npc that doesn't match speed with the fucking player
Escort missions
The only good escort missions are the ones where you aren't limited at all by the NPC you need to escort, which no longer makes it an escort mission.
All the ones gacha games employ: daily stamina, grind to get some currency, power creep the characters, create content that can only be cleared with premium characters etc.
A lot of pokemon adjacent games are like that, usual involves mtx
They do make it obvious the game should be uninstalled though
The outright scams and marketting dark patterns.
Outside of this, I hate when you have levelled up a character immensely to the point where an errant sneeze could wipe out half a city, and then you flick a boss to defeat their lineage then lose in the cutscene.
I know the reasons why this is done, but I would vastly prefer shorter but more fleshed out game experiences.
A shorter story that is actually repayable naturally where you can do so many things and there are not cutscene losses.
Speaking of which, things like ::: spoiler spoiler The Secret Ending ::: in Cyberpunk could be so much better if they just didn't fucking exist.
I don't want to have to read some guide to know that a a piece of content I really value will exist.
Its not fun to me to have notable portions of a game cut out such that you have to be a wiki reader.
These combined would make a game with a more stress free experience where you can truly just experience the world and not be too fussed about if you stuffed up a certain ending tree etc.
Games with inventories where they treat a single gem or a flower petal as occupying the same space in your rucksack as a pair of boots.
Guys, we go back to Ultima 7 with the key ring, the problem was solved along fucking time ago. Stop being lazy and have gem sacks, crafting bags, keyrings, etc for small items.
Anything pay to play ruins it for me.
Limited inventory space in an otherwise unrealistic RPG.
You're telling me I can carry six two-handed weapons and 500lbs of gold, but seven is just too much?! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Specifically, this especially sucks when the inventory is a grid, like in the Diablo series, or Grim Dawn, or WoW, FFXIV or... many other MMOs.
especially when you can spend real money to alleviate the artificial limitation they fucking designed in to the game.
It's so unnecessary and these days absolutely makes me instantly not care to continue playing. FUCK artificial limitations that don't have clear, valid reasons.
I'm here to play a game, not Inventory Management Simulator 33.45
Exponentially growing requirements that out pace rewards. I don't want to spend 10 hours grinding just to level up.
Time gates. Gacha games are rife with them...
Want a piece of equipment for your character? Well spend daily currency to get one that regenerates over a day. Oops rng God hates you and you got +Def for a character that wants +Atk, better luck tomorrow/next week... Oops it's still not your week +Hp this time.
multiplayer shooters with unlockable weapons/classes
Ah another one - Forced stealth sections where you can't be detected at all. Especially in a game where stealth is optional or not even a thing you can really do normally.
The forced stealth level early on is what keeps me from replaying Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
Probably the Enemy Boxer from Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. Canonically he is a mechanic but they don’t even give him the wrench ability which isn’t even that special of an ability, and then he dies like a wimp with his plastic still-alive head getting chopped off by the plane that he’s supposed to be repairing. An idiot who would punch an anvil three times in a row deserves that sort of graceless demise.
I see what you did there
INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE
Lootboxes
Time limits / countdowns.
Sports games pretty much stopped progressing entirely when the "ultimate team" cancer spread.
Grinding and no rewards. Feeling underpowered and dying all the time, unable to progress with loot alone.
Looking at you, Path of Exile.
Unchangeable difficulty settings. Worse, games that offer you to lower it and don't warn you that they're going to lock it at the lower setting. Resident Evil Village did that to me. Last time I posted about this someone said it warms you, so I guess they changed it.
Quick time events.
Carry weight.
Hiding content in New Game Plus. Making me play a game twice just to artificially ass replay "value."
Carry slot limits annoy me more.
Weight makes sense from a story perspective. Even a top-spec fighter can't carry four zweihanders and 500 food rations.
But even the 1-STR mage who might have a legitimate carry weight limit of 2kg, should not be told "you can only carry 3 different types of 10-gram herb." Especially if he's allowed to carry 200 units of any one of the types. Give me anything resembling a viable story-based reason for that.
But selling a solution to that is a very popular monetization paradigm for MMOs, so it stays.
If we leave realism aside for a moment, though, the difference is that:
It depends on the game what's more fitting for the overall design, but yeah, ultimately you want to prevent the player from optimizing the fun out of the game.
Having very heavy armor or dozens of healing potions can be boring, since there's no risk anymore. But having one of each different kind of item can also kill the fun, because having the perfect solution for every situation is just as boring.
I'd argue that rather than carry weight, the real culprit is shops where you can sell stuff. If you knew right away that junk is not worth picking up, because you can't sell it, then you wouldn't pick it up. And then the carry weight limit can do what it was designed for, which is to make you strategize what equipment to bring along.
Sometimes I would appreciate a "Loot all except junk" button, and possibly having the option of manually marking certain items as junk
Fallout's solution to that is the Junk Jet which uses junk as ammo. You can collect all the teddy bears you can find and launch them at your enemies.
Remember that brief period where games would have items specifically designed to be vendor trash?
Yeah, and you'd often get a separate junk inventory, along with a one-click button to sell everything from there. I guess, at least it was an attempt to solve the problem...
Carry weight is gameplay balancing. Without it on those games you'd just hoard a million healing items or something.
All the junk in fallout? I know it's worthless, but my compulsion is to loot everything.
I'm not opposed to those that want that mechanic, but it would be nice for there to simply be a toggle to disable it.
I can't stand going into a dungeon and on the third chest having to decide what to throw away this time.
I'm ALWAYS going to have a max inventory, it's stupid not to play a game without it. If I can carry 10 healing items, I will just in case. But it also means at every single drop, I have to go into my inventory and decide what to toss. Or if to toss. It's takes up time when want to do the fun things in the game. And it makes me have to constantly make decisions and think if this item is better than one I have, and if so what do I get rid of. Do I get rid of healing potions or mana potions? When is the next time I can sell this? How much is this worth?
I play games to play games. Not to micromanage inventory.
Okay, but make crafting mats 0 at least or have a second "hoard" inventory that doesn't count but is also inaccessible in combat or something. Just give us a way to clean out a dungeon without having to do a bunch of time wasting bullshit.
Just because a bad mechanic has a purpose doesn't mean it's not bad.
I hate being forced to think about that shit.
I love a partial solution in Cyberpunk where healing items simply have a cool down.
Odenst make lore sense really, but you can flavour text that up.
Weightlimits mostly serve to add annoying inventory management to a game that is supposed to be an escape.
They should design their games better to not need the player to do that or horde things.
Its part of why I hate how "loot" is typically done.
I like that system and also collection ones where you don't have to have multiples of an item. Once you have it its an option.
Better save this potion for later, I might need it.
Seriously, I will rate a game poorly on account of that replay plus bs.
It should only be there so you can experience being fully levelled out for the earlier missions.
Oooh, you would not like Fallout 76.
I don't think anyone likes Fallout 76
I played until they patches the bug where if you equipped/unequipped gear that affected carry weight fast enough it would't remove the effect every time and you could max it out.
Also, I hated that your stash was also limited by carry weight.
I'll mention God of War and its final battle. You spend the entire game building skill with one set of weapons, then the end of the game pushes a brand new set of moves on you. I never did finish the game because of that BS.
Underwater swimming on a game that wasn't built around it. Every single time it's a frustrating battle with poor camera angles and imprecise controls.
Oh I'm above the thing I need to collect but slightly out of grabbing range, all I need to do is go straight down... And now I'm 20ft away.
Taking control away from the player for stupid bullshit.
Dragon's Dogma 2 had this to the most extreme level I had ever seen. Random NPCs can initiate dialogue without you hitting a prompt (and they can appear anywhere, even in the middle of a cave full of monsters). Your companions will sometimes high five you, and it just forces you into an animation that it didn't prompt you for. There is an actual boss fight in the game that is literally a cutscene of someone else fighting it.
Dragon's Dogma? More like Dragon's Dogshit. 😬
Courier: Hey, i got a message for you. Let see...
Giant closing in before sending you to meet Talos
That example also made me think of Elder Scrolls games, but I was thinking about how in the case of guards running up to detain you, forcing you into dialogue is legitimate. But yeah, the Skyrim couriers, not so much!
At least dialogue pauses the game in Skyrim. DD2, it doesn't so now that gryphon you were running away from has a free shot at your ass 😩
I think it's real time? After oblivion all are real time, which is why in FO4 you can kind of walk away any time(but you have to struggle a bit for the control to respond)
If you disable the dialogue camera, which is on by default, yeah it just continues playing.
FYI: There is a bug that still exists in FO4 with disabling the dialogue camera for the initial scene when entering Diamond City as well as returning to the baseball guy (Moe something?) after grabbing his requested items where if you initiate dialogue while in power armor, the whole conversation locks up and you're stuck unable to do anything except reload a save. I just leave it on now, cuz even the unofficial patch does not fix this.
Ohh forgot about that option. I think i find it weird to not have the dialog camera, and the locked up doesn't bother me much.
That reminds me of Fable 2, where the worst character in the entire series (who you're forced to ally with) will kill-steal the final boss if you don't shoot them during their speech.
I would love an online/offline mmo use a modified version of the companion system were your character could be marked for people to use as a companion and also integrate in the gambit system from final fantasy so you can config how your character behaves maybe even with quips.
Deliberately ableist bullshit. Like no pause or an over reliance on quick time events.
The skulls in MGSV.
"Let's put almost unkillable, magic zombies that chase you into this stealth game. Also, make them unavoidable"
Doom3 flashlight. It’s Doom. Not fucking 5 Nights at Freddy’s.
when ![email protected] can give you dozens of illumination options more capable than science fiction has
Alien pods getting a free move as soon as you uncover them
What is this, some X-COM game?
Yep!
Been playing Dark Deity (a Fire Emblem clone) lately and instead of permadeath, it reduces a random stat by 10% permanently. Can't say I'm a fan. Just have a permadeath mode and a regular mode.
Wow that's on my backlog list but seriously, it forces a reload either way, at least make it a splashy permadeath.
Agreed. I do like the game a lot, though. It just has this one weird decision.
Escort missions
Missable or multiplayer-only achievements. Or the ones that force you to replay the game.
Ghost of Yōtei is doing it well. Everything is available at all times after the main story is completed in a single game. I could think of a few possible achievements they could have created that would be missable but I'm glad they didn't.
GTA5 has a lot of multiplayer achievements I could never get because I hate GTA Online.
Talos Principle 2 has at least two achievement that each needs a replay to the end and you have to follow a specific path of talking to characters that you don't know upfront if you're not looking online for it. So if you're trying this without a guide you might end up replaying it more than twice. That's shitty.
Often it's climbing.
I'm looking at you, breath of the wild.
Speaking of botw, lots to explore and find... And none of it is worthwhile or actually affect the gameplay in any real way.
Especially when it's the excuse for the massive world that takes forever to traverse.
And now let's convince the entire industry that this blight is a good idea and shoehorn it in to everything
Completing botw became more of a chore than anything else. I couldn't get all the way through tears of the kingdom. The chores in that one just compounded. I managed to somehow light up the entire underworld and yet my gear was too fucking terrible to face the end bosses.
Botw was very cool at times, but it had a few things that made it utterly frustrating to play. The weapons breaking and having to watch Link go "uhh eeefff eeeff ooof" on the side of a cliff for hours was just painful and purposeless.
To your point, it seems like no game can manage to have an expansive, explorable world that's actually rewarding to explore. Maybe there is an exception out there but I haven't encountered it.
Elden Ring has done it best so far, particularly the dlc, but it also obliterated the replay value compared to other souls games with how much empty traversal it adds and now that you can go anywhere you know what's available and wind up googling where things are instead of making do with your limited options as you go.
I feel like The Witcher 2 had a good balance. You're instanced in a smallish but very meaningfully designed map that's big enough to feel like you're actually exploring a bit, but small enough to actually be hand-designed and decorated and feel like it too
I'll have to take your word for it, I couldn't stand witchers combat until 3. Heard nothing but good things about it otherwise
If only it was climbing. BOTW was more like "oh there was light rain recently so fuck you, no access up here."
The indie game Sable had brilliant climbing mechanics. You have limited climbing like in most games, but you literally don't need the extended climbing range for almost the entirety of the main game except for like one or two not-required missions, you only really need it to collect all of the collectables that extend your climbing range. You know how I know? I didn't find the way to extend climbing range until like the very end of the game. Somehow completely skipped over it!
I 100%d sable and only found it mildly frustrating in certain parts. Pretty good game overall.
I wish there were more games like it where you could just enjoy the world instead of it being all about some missions.
Achievements.
I want to enjoy the game, not artificial milestones for bragging rights.
Not the worst, but I'm annoyed by invisible walls. Just give me a reason why I can't be there.
Games that have long scripted sections you can't skip and sometimes even save. Next level, you'll have to move around and answer questions so can't even go take a shit.
Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk both had sections like that. Loved the games, hated that bullshit.
Which section in cyberpunk are you referring to? I was 100% on board with what you were saying and then that stumped me.
The whole section between the takemura junkyard cutscene and waking up in your appartment doesn't allow saving, however iirc when the game came out it was the ENTIRE heist sequence once you got to yorinobus room.
All I can think of is maybe at the start of Phantom Liberty? On first arrival at Dogtown you were locked in to a string of missions for a while but I don't remember if you couldn't pause or save because I did all of that part in one go anyway.
I'm pretty certain that you could
I could be wrong it's been years since I played. Just have a memory of wanting to take a break and not being able to.
Holding a button to do anything/everything. I can see the logic of where it may be useful, but it doesn't need to be used for everything. So damn annoying.
*Oh, and similarly, forcing excessive submenus to do basic things, like continue a save from the main menu. That should be one, maybe two button presses, not 4+ along with a confirmation. I'll never understand games with stuff like that.
No Man's Sky is a repeat offender for both of those things. How they've released constant major updates for a decade but never taken the time to fix their terrible user interface is one of life's great mysteries.
press ▲ to jump. shit button. it's x.
QTE
Progression systems that draw attention away from the core gameplay loop
Examples are season passes, archivements, minigames that took longer too complete then the main game
Poorly done procedural generation where it's a waste of time to explore. The first Remnant was pretty bad about this, with small setpieces scattered throughout the levels that looked interesting but usually only contained basic enemies and one or two empty pots. Filling out the map was a chore that was almost never worth the effort - almost never because sometimes there was a unique drop hidden in a level just to screw over anyone who got sick of fighting through hundreds of empty buildings and decided to stick to the main path.
Starfield did more of this. What a dud that was!
Bethesda's random leveled loot is another contender for worst mechanic. It was always fun picking the lock on a master-level chest deep in a dungeon only to find thirteen coins and a wooden spoon inside.
"Some may call this junk. Me, I call it treasure." could be a line from their design document.
Health as a resource
For board games, not having a firm way to end the game. A lot of Steve Jackson games have this problem where the mechanics of the game mean a lot of people will prevent people from winning the game , which usually lengthens the game as people have more power to keep others from winning than winning themselves.
Invite your friends for "bonus" resources, or even worse, to unlock progression.
If you want to incentivize me to growthhack your product, let's talk dollars, not Mystic Sunshine Gems.
Souls. The clumsy roll and artificial difficulty spikes and losing all your shit because you didn’t do it all “just right” for the entire encounter.
Ugh.
EDIT: Honorable mention . . . Timers. I’m looking at you, current Bungie.
Microtransactions
Health scaling as you level. Just ducking lazy.
One of the worst game mechanics ever found in a game was where the enemy got harder as you gained levels. The same enemy. It basically defeated the value of having more levels. I think it was Oblivion
Skyrimwhere I found this, particularly annoying.MTX for customisation
Hold w to crawl forward
Survival crafting. I spend my real life days trying to keep up on sheltering and feeding myself. I don’t want to “relax” by punching trees to make a fire to cook a bird I punched to death.
The pervasiveness of this in every game has limited the content I engage with the last 10 or so years. Everyone started chasing that Minecraft money and now it’s Ubi-fied into just about every mainstream title.
I don’t want to forge new weapons. I want to find them in a chest or earn them by killing a boss. I have bounced off of so many games the moment they ask me to learn a system of crafting. Keep that in it’s own genre and stop padding games out with repetitive busy work.
Fishing
"Here's a rare weapon dropped by this boss! But wait, you need to be at least level 30 to use it, and you're still on level 2."
I went out of my way to repeatedly grind and kill this late game boss during early game, just give me my reward for not following the stupid linear progression
Not really the worst, but my hot take of something I don't like: puzzles rather than problems. By that I mean puzzles have one correct solution and everything else is wrong and doesn't work, while with a problem you're given some tools and an obstacle and just let loose. It's so much more satisfying to find your own solution that it is to reach the end and realize you were being sneakily handheld through it to make sure you found the only possible way through. I've done a few good problems where I reach the end, then immediately reload the save from before and try some different routes just to see if it works.
Puzzles do have their place though, especially in tutorials.
Fragile world-spanning deliveries.
Silksong has me screaming over them, 10 - 20 minutes of walking and one too many smacks at the end ruins it. And then there's the one that's also timed!
But to be fair, most of Silksong gets me yelling at the TV on the regular! I love it and hate it!
When someone dies in Mario multiplayer there's a short pause in the gameplay. It really fucks up everyone else's timing.
No natural health/mana regeneration. I hate games where you need potions to survive or are limited in your spell usage just because you do not enough mana which was finished earlier.
Europa Universalis 4 forced historical events while also advertising it as a sandbox. For example: no matter how stable you are as netherlands. As soon as you end your golden age your country will go into a civil war that if you have collonies you can barely get out of. Because "well it was in history like that"
Since all the obvious answers have been covered, I'm gonna dig deep on a genre nobody but me even plays anymore anyway.
Character-based asymmetry in versus puzzle games. It's never been remotely balanced, and I don't believe it ever could be.
Suppose I put you in charge of developing a balance patch for Puyo Puyo Fever, Puzzle Bobble 3, Magical Drop, Meteos, etc, you could just name any other puzzle game that has this. What changes would you make? What changes could you even try to make?
If you look at something like a fighting game, characters have large movesets, and every move has a bunch of variables attached: startup, active, recovery, hitstun, damage, meter gain. Which means there's a lot of surface area for developers to adjust and fine-tune until the cast hopefully feels balanced enough. Even if they don't get it right on the first try, they can gather data from players and use that information to figure out what needs to be patched.
Puzzle games have little to no room to even try to do this. So when you try to give character choice a mechanical effect on gameplay, but they only do one thing like a dropset or garbage pattern, there are almost no meaningful buffs or nerfs that can be handed out when it turns out that Void Hole is kinda good and Skeleton T kinda isn't.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix famously tried, and, well, an attempt was made but it ultimately couldn't do all that much. The tiers got shuffled around slightly, but it's still Ken Fighter.
Enchant weapons/armor to +x%. It usually companies Pay2Win items that you can use to have a 100% chance of upgrading, or at least not breaking your armor.
Button-mashing events. (The Rapid-fire kind)
Weapon durability
I kinda disagree. Sure, if it's just thrown on top with no real thought to it, it's bad. But it's possible to build around durability to make it a core part of the game. Think Zelda BOTW and TOTK. Weapon durability is a central part of the combat gameplay loop in those games. There's plenty of weapons lying around, so you never really run out, and there are more details that mean you can actually use the system to your advantage (like how you deal massive damage on the breaking hit).
I literally quit playing botw and totk because of weapon durability. It adds nothing to the game except to make it possible I'm in an unwinnable boss fight because I forgot to bring more than five weapons. If I could use weapons for 5x as long it wouldn't have made me quit; I'd just not like that part of the game. But some weapons lasting only 3-5 hits is fucking ridiculous.
Funny because that's exactly the games I'm thinking of.
Granted I was trying to play the game on hard mode so that didn't help, but the system felt awful to me. There's a band of goblins, let me see if I have any weapons bad enough to be worth spending on them.
Yes. Gtfo here with that. Infuriating.
Unskippable cutscenes. Escort quests where I have to walk slowly.
Crafting. And jumping games.
How about the release broken game then finish the game way after release… if you’re lucky mechanic?
Maybe not the worst, but I've been playing old RPGs and I really hate mandatory loss fights in late game or NG+. Radiata Stories was a fantastic game but I was bonkers powerful on my second playthrough yet somehow lost a fight to a humongous chud asshole for plot reasons. Rare misstep in that games story, honestly.
Best example of subversion of that trope, though,b was in Dragon Quest 11. If you know, you know, but I won't spoil that, lol.
Puzzles that are entirely music based with no visual cues.
They're bad enough for me as just a guy with no rhythm or note recognition, but also just fuck deaf people I guess?
Archers interrupting your attacks. Fucking archers.
I was recently reading The Frugal Wizards Handbook for Surviving Medieval England and one of the characters who ultimately gets shot by an archer talks at length about how much he dislikes archers and how unfair they are
Fuck you gears of war for creating the trope of walking while dialogue is playing so you don't advance too fast. Just give me the fucking cutscene, you're not fooling anyone
Ante, Magic the Gathering
Gambling.
I've got a time-traveling kick in the nuts prepared for whoever invented wall-humping for unmarked secrets. I first remember this from Wolfenstein 3D but I'm not sure if it existed before then.
You know when you are in the middle of a game's story and then you get caught or something wjd the enemy takes all your gear and you have to find your gear or fight to get it back? No screw that. So annoying.
And I'm the kind of player that does all sise quests before doing the main story so I can be OP and plow through the story. Just let me do that and don't take what I worked hard to get.
Auto you lose cutscenees
Hidden story trees or finicky story trees so you have to meticulously follow guides lest you get a bad end or miss a secret ending
Weapons that break.
No. Never. Stop doing it.
Shotguns that only are effective up to 10 ft
What game actually has shotguns act like real shotguns???
Loading screen ass tunnels or hallways or elevators.
We live in 2025. Evryone has Ssds and there are many ways to load as a player advances. Stop doing this 1990s shit.
Timers.
Just never find them fun
Forced heavy backtracking.
I'm not having fun, you're just wasting my time. Fuck you.
Unrelated puzzle mini games
Please stop adding worthless busy work into games. One of the first mods I added to Cyberpunk was just to remove the stupid breach protocol. It's not that its hard, it's not. It's just time wasting and annoying. Dispatch is another game with these for no reason. Fallout, Bioshock, fucking so many games have this shit.
Either I have the level to pick the fucking lock or I don't. I don't want to play some half assed unrealistic lockpicking sim for the equivalent of an hour by the time the game is done. It's like making you have to take each step for your character or breathe. Not the point.
Obviously all mtxs, goes without saying and marketting dark patterns like everything here.
Nerfing """OP""" things in single player power fantasy games.
Are you high? That's the fucking point!
Chance based loot.
Just no. I don't want to reload a dozen times to get the thing I want. It arguably exists in the world and I should just be able to go find it.
Loot.
Stop spreading this shit around making me have to waste time everywhere I go in order to be remotely optimally equipped.
Just say no to loot.
Healing should be on a cool down and have upgrades availible like in cyberpunk, Ammunition should be on enemies, cooldown or purchased
Weapons if loot able should be placed identically with no luck elements, or in exactly the stores they should be in.
Escort Missions. Especially when pathfinding AI was terrible.
Quick Time Events in a game that it isn't the focus. Halo 4 had exactly two quick time events. One in the first level and one in the last level.
I have a dislike for cutscenes. Often during gameplay, suddenly you lost control, often behavior is inconsistent, and you have to wait to be able to continue to play.
The half-life series shows how it can be done without. Story without losing control. Characters do their scripted behavior within the context of the world.
This is more game specific than anything else, but the slingshot rock from Dungeon Clawler. Temporarily destroys an item, uses the first item item it hits once, and then the next twice before disappearing. Doesn't bounce in a way I like.
QTEs
Fucking RE4 Original
Have you heard about Fatal, pretty sure that it's hard to beat game mechanics to evaluate physical injury due to an inter species rape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTLFNlu2N_M
I feel like most game mechanics are good when implemented well and bad when implemented poorly. unless you count stuff like p2w/gatcha/gambling
Waiting.
Zelda boss fights
Inventory management
Anything requiring you repeatedly mash a single button super fast
Miss a turn.
Ps1 Spider-Man having 3 bosses in a row at the end of the game.
I thought about my answer, since many mechanics I don't like can have good implementations, or at the very least are a sort of lesser of two evils kind of thing.
What I can't stand are tactical or RPG games with realtime or turn based combat option toggles. I play many games with one or the other and enjoy them, but when I play a game with both that can be toggled in options I always feel like neither setting feels perfectly right. The balance is always off no matter what. Understandable with game devs having to double the amount of work for creating combat and tuning items and it ends up feeling a little soggy every time.
Roll and move. Skip your turn.
Random chance to miss attack to high ground. Blink dagger reduced range if you click past the distance radius of the item.
I'm looking at you, Dota2.
I don't really know the name of the game mechanics, but when I was a kid I bought, with my saves, Halo Wars for Xbox 360, the worst investment I have done after ChainLink cryto purchase, well as a newbie I listened to my friend how Halo was the best game they have ever played!!!, as the you all may guess, the were talking about Halo 4.
Since then I am GOW fan. Halo wars had a poor mechanics for me 12 years ago, maybe today could be a game I would like.
Math
If I wanted to do math, I'd play D&D.
The computer's job is to do math, not mine as a player. Any game that exposes it's math to the extent that a player is incentivized to do math is a failure of game design.
Mate, some of us factorio nerds enjoy that shit
Can confirm. A pretty significant amount of the time I've put into that game has been doing calculations on paper and then redoing them again after they turn out wrong.
I'm glad for you, but count me out.
I like maths. What game are you talking about?
Not OP but Kerbal space program is far better when you have a mod that calculates delta V for you. Otherwise you have to manually recalculate everything every single time you make a small change to your rocket. And without knowing the delta V you have no hope of reaching many of the planets in the game
Oh don't forget MechJeb. Some call it cheating, but ain't nobody in the real world docking 2 craft in orbit by hand, so why should I be required to do so in my space-lite simulation game? Plus if your craft is weird enough (or your mission has become funky enough) you still have to do some things manually because MechJeb can't quite figure it out
I'm glad for you, and I'm happy to use math in every day life, but for me its work. Many games have this problem for me, but take any game with items that have numerical stats as the only way to differentiate them. So to compare two items the player has to look at the numbers. To me that moment is work, not fun. I prefer a graphical or audio representation of the difference. Maybe color or size indicates the gameplay difference. Something like that makes it more enjoyable to me.
Roguelike. Especially in games that are supposed to have a narrative.
Real time with pause à la CRPG (BG, POE etc...)