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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.
Roguelike. Especially in games that are supposed to have a narrative.
QTEs
Fucking RE4 Original
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
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
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.
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.
Escort missions
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.
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.
Unskippable intro levels that teach the control mechanics.
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.
Bonus if you also can’t access settings and it’s stuck in a stupid resolution or something.
Truly. I won’t even think about starting a game without looking at the options menu.
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
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.
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
Unskippable cutscenes. Escort quests where I have to walk slowly.
QTE
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).
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.
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.
Any game that forces snap to center cameras. No one should ever have to fight against the controls in a game.
(Looking at you No Man’s Sky)
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.
