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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. 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
I built a self-repair skill mod for Fallout New Vegas specifically because I hated that shit.
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.
I would totally be up for requiring more resources to craft a tool to not have it degrade ever.
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 don’t think that I can give the worst, but I can give some that I did not enjoy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature.
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
- 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.
Super Star Wars was a major non-shmup offender. The game was incredibly hard even with a maxed out weapon. Dying sent you back 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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!”
Act 1 BG3 was pretty bad about this. I thought the tadpole plot was going to be resolved in Act 1!
THAT’S NOT GOING TO WORK!
TRY SOMETHING ELSE!
USE THE TADPOLE!
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~
Where one enemy sees you and now all their friends somehow knows where you are
I could understand it if the enemies communicate somehow, like relaying your location
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.
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.
QTE, especially when they’re randomly inserted into an otherwise action/skill based game.
Dying Light, I’m looking at you…
Mmmhm
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.
