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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.”
At least THAC0 was fun to say!
Oh yeah that’s true, it is somehow unreasonably fun to say.
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.
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?
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.
God I can’t stand it. It’s one of those things like “Why do I need that, my eyes can already do that”
Timer that can be skipped with paid currency.
I too was about to day Dungeon Keeper for mobile. What a wasted game.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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Where one enemy sees you and now all their friends somehow knows where you are
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.”
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.
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
Dying Light, I’m looking at you…
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
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.
