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.
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.
I could never get into Animal Crossing for this very reason
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…
Fucking time trials man
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.
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.
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 = ($o$)
Less of an issue nowadays but unclimbable knee-high walls which force you to go round. Always drove me crazy!
Especially egregious in games where you already climb around in other places!
Fallout 3 and NV had loads of this crap. A door is busted to hell and somehow locked but you need a key to unlock it. A stiff breeze will destroy the rest of the door.
Fatal Frame 4 release has the most agonizing form of this.
There’s a hallway you’ve been down before, but at one point a ghost blocks it with a wheelchair. A WHEELchair.
Lol, that’s ridiculous!
The new Gollum game was very impressive in the way it managed to implement so many of the mechanics in this thread
That game took one of my most hated mechanics (binary moral choices), came up with a concept for it I could have actually loved (the personas arguing), then botched the execution so badly that it felt even worse than a normal morality system. Impressive is certainly the word for Gollum, just not in the way the devs hoped.
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.
For me, the absolute worst is when the game effectively punishes you for not constantly menu diving to change your equipment.
Some random examples:
Disco Elysium - your clothes have a MASSIVE effect on some specific stats which influence dialogues. In order to get the best outcomes, you have to change your clothes before an interaction with another character.
Ghost of Tsushima - you get separate armor sets for different activities, which is not too bad, except one of the sets is for exploration. So every time you switch between combat and riding your horse, if you don’t switch your armor sets, then it feels that the game is punishing you.
I love both of those games, but really really hate that mechanic.
If you hate menu diving then Tears of the Kingdom will actually make you go insane. I’m constantly swapping armor and scrolling up and down to find specific items.
For a game that has borderline genius baked into almost every system it presents, the UX of the menus is bafflingly shite.
Oh my god yes, couldn’t someone have come up with a better way to do this over the 6 years of development time? I keep itching for full text search at the very least.
That’s funny, I actually think TotK is great in this regard.
The DPad Up quick inventory menu is awesome and the sorting options are exactly what I’d want (most used, attack power, type, and zonai).
Having quick swappable equipment sets would be nice but so many games lack that feature that I don’t even think about it. In TotK it also seems unnecessary unless you’re into min-max. Like, I just need one piece of fire immune clothing to go into Death Mountain, I don’t need to wear an entire set and if I was really lazy I could pop an elixir from the quick select menu instead.
Cooking is annoying though. It’s such a fun animation and satisfying outcome but the laborious hold and drop mechanics get tedious when you’re cooking in bulk.
Anything using timers, especially based on the clock. It just artificially adds playtime, and it also means I forget about them and lose track of what I was doing most the time, too.
Agreed, timed missions especially stress me out. Just let me do shit in my own pace!
I can say that the only timed content I enjoyed was in WoW and it was the Challenge Modes.
Both because you could try it multiple times and because the reward was an actual prestigious and awesome reward.
I can’t think of another game with a timed run mechanic that offered anything close to that.
My only contention for good timed content in video games would be examples similar to the beginning of Metroid Prime. “The whole planet is gonna explode and you need to leave RIGHT NOW!!” type of deal. It’s essentially the same as putting a timer on a task, in fact that game does show you a timer with how long you still have until the place explodes, except it doesn’t feel like a fakey cop out
Currently playing through “unsighted”. It is a really nice metroidvania game, however everyone (even you) is dying and only has a certain time left. For now i am really enjoying the novelty, but I hope no game copies this. It does really stress me out. knowing that i have to go and upgrade my weapons now because the blacksmith npc s dying in 4 in game hours(like 10 minutes irl). Or quietly exploring the beautiful world just to get a pop up showing that the (nice elderly) consumables vendor is about to die. Like I said it is quite novel, but does have me not play the game often due to knowing wath wil come. I’d say try it out if you feel like stressing a bit :).
Yep, soon as the calendar came up in P5 I quit. Same with FE3H. I did eventually go back to P5 and followed a single playthrough walkthrough, but it far overstayed its welcome.
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
Sadly, the whole “rogue” genre if that counts as a mechanic. I don’t enjoy replaying everything over and over again in different ways in a system where its designed one should fail eventually, so you must lose to continue. It sounds great on paper but hell it really sucks. Also, turn based stuff.
I think you’re describihg “Rogue-lites”, which are games where you can maintain some permanent progression even after you lose. “Rogue-likes”, which are games that are like the game Rogue, are games where when you lose you just go back to the start with no progression at all, so you need to complete the game altogether.
The permanent progression rewards are meant to be a kind of crutch, which is where the “lite” comes from.
Why I’m making this distinction is that the original rogue-likes don’t expect you to fail at all - or rather, they do, but there’s no expectation of needing to fail to progress.
That’s an important distinction for sure, thanks for adding that. Roguelites looks so fun and I wish I could enjoy them but after awhile it just feels like a timewaste. But that’s just me of course. I wonder if I would enjoy roguelikes more, not sure if I’ve tried one or not? What are some examples of roguelikes today? I tried searching Steam but for some reason games use both the tags roguelike and roguelite.
Risk of rain 2 is almost a pure roguelike. The only thing that you can increase from run to run are lunar coins that can be used in a run to buy lunar items with tradeoffs. But other than adding extra variety to the game you don’t need to use lunar items at all, winning depends on skill and partially drop rng.
I’ve not beaten it yet but Noita seems to be a pure roguelike.
I like it until I get pretty good at the game. At that point the runs start taking too long to complete and it’s no longer fun. I know this is pretty controversial but I especially hate it in games like Hades where you progress, come up against something new, fail until you learn the mechanic, and then have to get through all the previous bullshit before you can apply what you learned.
I understand the sentiment, but in some way I think you are missing the point. Let me try to explain the appeal.
When you play, for example, Diablo you spend the time with the game making your build. You also play the story and see the bosses but your focus gameplay wise is your build.
Yo go for that skill. You farm that weapon. Yo optimize your buffs and load out.
And when you are done, after 20 or 30 hours… the game becomes extremely easy. Playing your fully builder character has no challenge. And building another is a 20 hour time investment.
So you get into PVP. Or into boss rushes where yo can get marginal improvements. You repeat a very small amount of end game content for months.
Enter the “rogue” mechanics.
The play unit is no longer “the character”, now it is “the run”
You build a full character each run. You make meaningful decisions to make the most of your build with what the game is offering.
If a run goes badly you are 30 min or less away from getting were you were. If you win you can play again for a completely different experience.
You have no complete control about your build, so you can’t really on the same strategy and gameplay for the whole game. You have to engage with every system.
And your reward for playing is choice (more options to better controls your play style) and knowledge (to better use what the game throws at you)
And it’s true you repeat the initial part of the game a lot. But in Diablo (keeping with my previous example) you repeat the endgame. The only diferente is that one is front loaded and the other is back loaded. And initial areas USUALLY have more work put into them in both cases.
Also remember that there are a spectrum between Isaac likes and Hades likes. There are games were chance has lots of importance and a good build in the hands of a bad player can steamroll the game, where in others a bad build in the hands of a great player is viable.
Definitely. Crypt of the Necrodancer probably has really cool locales and enemies in it. I don’t know, because most of my sessions were locked to the first few worlds where any mistake minimizes your time in future worlds.
non-renewable consumable items.
using consumables is hard enough, but you’re telling me there’s a finite number of these? forget it.
only exception is rougelikes.
Yep. I never use consumables. Unless the game really pushes you to use them they feel like cheating.
they feel like cheating.
Or worthless. This item increases your dmg for 10 seconds.
Dude, 1 second is the animation alone and after consuming it, I need to use 3 skills to snapshot the dmg increase so effectively I have 4-5 seconds of actual usage.
Consumables are horrible as a system in general.
Offline games which require an internet for no apparent reason has to be my pet peeve
Yeah it guarantees that the game will be unplayable through legal means in a few years when it is no longer profitable to keep the servers running.
Perhaps not specifically a mechanic, per se, but save points. I want to be able to save whenever, wherever. I don’t always have time to make it to the next save point before I need to stop playing.
Honestly it’s games lacking save points that has made devices like the Steam Deck so nice for gaming. Being able to have a dedicated gaming device that I can put to sleep whenever without reaching a save point is fantastic.
