The other thread about favorite mechanics is great, so let’s also do the opposite: what are some of your most hated mechanics?
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Unrepairable weapons are the worst thing. There’s nothing worse than finding a super cool, rare weapon and being paranoid about it breaking.
That’s one of the big things that bothered my in Breath of the Wild. I wanted to go to this cool looking location and find something neat, but I knew that I’ll either get a weapon that breaks in 5 hits, a seed, or an orb. Really deflated my sense of exploration when I realized this was the gameplay loop.
Exactly! It triggers my hoarding response and I find myself keeping all the weapons because something harder might be around the next corner. I end up with only using boko clubs for half the game…
It was definitely a pain in the ass. That was the first game I thought of. Second was dying light. Nothing like get swamped by a hoard and all your equipped weapons break.
Radiant quests. You can never complete the game because of this, the quests are generic and repetitive and offer nothing but “stretch the playtime”.
That and mechanics like “rando dragon attacks in Skyrim” and "City is under attack from Fallout 4. I quit F4 because I was on my way to a mission and got the "city under attack notification, and on my way to defend another city was under attack.
To yes-and this: procedural content in general. No Man’s Sky is a snore-fest for me, big, empty, meaningless. Missions in Elite Dangerous and X4 are similarly pretty boring, though the former is more fun the first time around. There has to feel like there’s some world-affecting point to what you’re doing. IMO
I found the procedurally-produced planets in No Man’s Sky to be stunningly beautiful. Then I would walk around on them and the similar-but-not-quite look of every part of the landscape would slowly drive me INSANE.
I started playing No Man’s Sky recently and it looks like they added a mode that’s more ‘streamlined’. Dunno if it’s still procedurally generated, though.
Pretty much a lot of procedural “content”. I guarantee big publishers will capitalize on all of this AI to replace writers with generated stories/quests/etc. No idea what to make of this.
I would disagree, some of my favorite games are procedurally generated.
Factorio, RimWorld or valheim for example.
Oh totally. I didn’t mean to imply “all procedural content = bad”. Terraria comes to mind and is one of my favorite game of all time. The “world” is procedural when created, but there are “key” areas/objectives that don’t change. I’m thinking more along the lines of Fallout 4’s “radiant” junk that big publishers salivate over because mountains of endless+cheap content = ($o$)
Game timers. I want to screw around on my time. The more time-based a game becomes, the less I enjoy it.
Timers just really stress me out for some reason. Give me more time damn it.
Fucking time trials man
I could never get into Animal Crossing for this very reason
This!
There’s not much else in gaming that makes my blood boil as much as being rushed… especially in single player games. I’m usually playing to relax so please don’t stress me out.
Yes! I remember that I could not really enjoy fallout 1 because of the 150 in-game days time limit to get the water chip…
Escort quests. Stealth sections in games that aren’t built around stealth would be close second.
Genshin Impact occasionally has little stealth missions where you have to sneak by guards.
Pain.
Obligate stamina bars/circles for traversal. Just allow me to move at the speed of fun, and definitely don’t make me stand still to recharge when climbing.
I think it’s telling that death stranding, a game all about traversal, let’s you sprint outright for as long as you want until well after your character’s shoes literally fall off. The stamina bar is more a measure of abuse rather than a limit on your movement.
I like stamina bars in many circumstances, but I’ve decided I hate them specifically in life sim games like Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, and similar - at least unless there’s an easy and fun way to re-fill them. I won’t write them off entirely, I think it can be done well, but in practice in these games they often serve no purpose but to frustrate you.
Good point! How is “my time?” I’ve been thinking of getting it to play with my gf. We really like dinkum.
Enemies that scale with your level in an RPG. I would rather get completely curb stomped by rare high level enemies, so I have something to work towards. In the same vein, I don’t like it when the stat gain you get from leveling ends up with you literally being unkillable by lower level enemies. Most MMOs are an offender to this, where you can just sunbathe in a group of 30 level 1 enemies and are unable to die to them.
GOD, yes. The Fable games are like that, resulting in a large portion of the endgame map in Fable III positively loaded with werewolves and what feels like nothing else. As these were intended to be hard-hitting and unfairly fast, traveling became an annoyance.
I’m curious what your happy medium is, though, since you dislike being over-leveled as well. I personally think being whaled on ineffectually is funny mental image, and sometimes I really just wanna chill
Pay 2 win and excessive abuse of FOMO.
E.g. for the next two weeks you can purchase/grind for [character] with a LIMITED EDITION green hat!
It would be OK if such thing was behind an achievement and allowed to be gained later.
Some companies have gotten a little sneaky with it, like Microsoft with age of empires. They make their newly released DLC civs overpowered for two months then nerf it every time.
People have said escort quests but I’m going to go more specific.
Escort quests WHERE THE NPC INEXPLICABLY HAS A DIFFERENT WALKING/RUNNING SPEED THAN THE PLAYER…
I think it was on one of the Half-Life 2 developer commentary where they mention that the made the NPC move faster than your walking speed, but slower than your running speed, so that you are able to catch up with them if you stay behind to look at something. If they move at your running speed, you are kinda forced to follow them all the time, and any obstacle will separate you more and more from the NPC that you are supposed to escort.
But that feels terrible if you want to follow them without stopping (or in the case of obstacles, are able to).
Even Ocarina of Time, in 1998, got this right. The Dampe race, which isn’t technically an escort, would feel weird if Dampe was too much faster or slower than you, because it would feel unfair. But not everyone moves as fast while playing - some people like rolling, which is a different speed from walking, etc. Also, he throws fireballs at you, and players who are less good at dodging them will end up being slower. So Dampe doesn’t “follow you,” (in fact, he spends most of the thing in front of you), but he has a rubber band effect. If you get too far behind, he slows down. If you get too far ahead, he speeds up. This does a good job of keeping him in view, which helps give the feeling that you’re going at an intended pace, whatever reasonable pace you take. If you’re too slow, you will fail, but… it pretty much requires standing still or getting hit by lots of fireballs.
In contrast, the Yunobo escort in BOTW feels terrible casually and even worse to speedrun. He’s faster than you walk, but much, MUCH slower than you run. And if you get too far ahead of him? He stops.
I have yet to play a game where NPCs have the same speed as the player, have you? I get it on the game design level, since NPCs need to move at a speed that their animations look natural at but player characters need to move fast enough to not feel frustrating to the character.
I have yet to play a game where NPCs have the same speed as the player, have you?
RDR2 did an excellent job with this by making it more of a pseudo cutscene. You can just hold a button and your character will match the target speed.
That seems great. I have RDR2 on my wishlist but unfortunately it would require more storage space than my entire laptop has at the moment.
Card games that get bolted on to other genres. cough genshin cough
What about open-world rpgs that get tucked onto card games? cough The Witcher 3 cough
Any sort of intense micromanagement of units, resources, etc. I’ve got like 16kb RAM in my brain. I can barely remember what I ate today lol.
Also, invisible walls that make absolutely no sense. Maybe just all invisible walls, really.
You’ve made me suddenly realize how rare invisible walls have gotten in my gaming life.
The closest I’ve come recently are “barriers” that are clearly just, like, a small pile of trash that could be easily walked over, but even that is rarer than it used to be.
I like some micromanagement. If it’s tinkering with gear or stats then I’m down. Working out how to squeeze out that little extra bit of damage or efficiency is great. However, if you have to actively micromanage units or resources during combat, then its a pass for me. I feel like micromanagement should be an addendum to the core gameplay loop, not it’s focus.
I really like the early access game Against the Storm, because it’s got micromanagement, but it’s also a bit of a roguelike so that no one run ever gets big enough to get too bogged down. It’s got the feel of the fun early part of a Civ game, but almost all the time, and with fun variations.
Having played a bit of Zelda recently, micromanaging weapons. Oh, I’ve got this metal broad sword and I’ve used it to to stab an unarmored fleshy bad guy and oh it’s broken after three stabs.
I get that weapon degradation is a real thing that happens, as they become blunt or potentially fragile, but Zelda BOTW and TOTK take it way too far to the point of it being a real chore. I thought they’d fix it after all the BOTW complaints but TOTK is just as bad.
Honestly, I think thats just a love it or hate it thing that I can totally see why it isnt for everyone and I dont blame you, but I personally love it and would hate to see it reduced/taken away. Once I leaned into it it really encourages me to explore and I enjoy the new fuse system enough that I like when a weapon breaks because Im excited to make a new one
I’m actually getting impatient when a weapon lasts too long, because I want it to break already so I can use something new and interesting without feeling like I’m wasting it. :P
I think part of it is having enough weapon slots that I’m choosing different weapons in different contexts, and so they all subjectively feel like they’re lasting longer than they did at the start of the game (even accounting for regular vs sturdy weapons).
Also making more use of shield fusions lately, and consumables on arrows, which again results in using the weapons less.
I keep kinda wishing I could fuse things to my bows though lol, even though I can use so many different consumables with the arrows already.
Yeah! I just learned that fusing elemental items to shields adds elemental shockwaves when you block, and it really made me think more about my shield fusions
Daily quests or login rewards, things to force me to play the game, always stop playing
I hate how in a lot of retro games water kills you instanly.
First thing I do in any game. Test the water.
First thing for me is fall damage and it almost always ends with me back at the Start screen
Quick-time events but SPECIFICALLY the ones that give you way too little time to react. Like, I never mind them too much, especially the ones in the Yakuza series, but I remember there was this game on the Wii called Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings that would throw these inputs WAYY too fast at you.
The end of Atomic Heart is an absurdly fast QTE. I played that whole game, and basically had to give up at 99.99% complete simply because I wasn’t fast enough.
I like them sometimes, but there should ALWAYS be a way to turn them off, for people who don’t have fast reflexes or have problems with their hands, etc.
Shout out to Spider-Man on PS4 for this! Love when a game has accessibility options around quick time events, or anything where you need to mash a button really fast.
Squad/micro-strategy mechanics in fps games. Commanding npcs to do specific things in the middle of a gunfight isn’t fun. Bonus points if the npc ai gets in your way when you’re not fighting as well.
Bad tutorials. Don’t teach me the game mechanics that could be learned in-game in an environment different from the rest of the game. Also dislike sudden lore dumps after the tutorial.
Mechanics in games where they don’t belong. Not every game needs skill trees, not every game needs stories or lore.
Squad/micro-strategy mechanics in fps games. Commanding npcs to do specific things in the middle of a gunfight isn’t fun.
While it’s ai is still sometimes a drunk toddler, i like the way arma offers it. You set rules of engagement and kind of a “ready mode”, and the formation and you’re set. Also quick hotkey based ways to change them.
You can still set up positions and micro manage your squad if you wanna but 90% of the time its unnecessary.
undefined> Bonus points if the npc ai gets in your way when you’re not fighting as well.
I swear I have yet to see a game where an NPC/ally doesn’t walk right in front of when attacking an enemy.
Squad/micro-strategy mechanics in fps games. Commanding npcs to do specific things in the middle of a gunfight isn’t fun. Bonus points if the npc ai gets in your way when you’re not fighting as well.
What games are you specifically thinking of here? The comment brings to mind the Brothers In Arms series, which was built entirely around controlling your troops and it was great.
I’m wondering if the problem is more of an issue with controlling NPCs being kind of half baked into an existing game than the concept itself.
Hunger or thirst mechanics in anything that’s not explicitly a survival game.
Best hunger mechanics are the ones that don’t harm your character when you’re hungry, but you do get a buff for eating.
Valheim’s like that. Don’t want to eat? Fine. Go multiple days without and you’ll still be ok. But if you want your hp to be all it can be, you’ll want to eat up before going out to fight.
Valheim’s hunger / food-as-major-buffs mechanic is legit the best way I’ve seen any video game handle food.
It’s also the reason I DO NOT like survival games.
I would be ok with this mechanic if I didn’t have to eat 10 bear steaks of 2 kilos each to last me for the next 10 minutes.
This is one of several reasons I didn’t play Ark for more than 2 days. Kill animals, get meat, cook at camp fire, eat throughout the day, store meat where half of it spoils before you can eat it.
Or where it just becomes a nuisance 5 minutes in. For example Subnautica, which is an amazing survival/exploration game. But the hunger/thirst becomes a chore like 30minutes in when you get the possibility to get food basically everywhere and stock up on water. Still enjoyed the exploration/base building a lot. But it really stopped being a survival game quickly, which honestly might have been for the best given its other qualities.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a popular roguelike that removed its hunger mechanic and the game is so much better.
I would be ok with it if I only needed to pick up the stuff and my character would eat it automatically, and not need to open up the menu every ten minutes
