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Anything requiring you repeatedly mash a single button super fast
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.
Roll and move. Skip your turn.
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 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.
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!
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
