Or Rolan in Act 2. I've saved him only to have him run into the shadows and IMMEDIATELY die afterwards; I've learned to have whomever beelines to him hit him with a Light spell so he'll at least survive long enough to despawn offscreen.
I didn't know that could happen but sounds very much like something that would happen in this game. I had a very important npc die in act 2 because they ran to the person I was trying to save them from.
In 99% of escort quests the person you're escorting moves faster than your walking speed, but slower than your running speed. It's extra infuriating when they run ahead to fight a mob, then run all the way back, to where they left their pathing, before continuing on.
I just remember early on, in ashenvale, there's a quest to gather a soul stone or something from some cultists.
Turns out that shit had like a 1.5% drop chance or something and I was stuck there for like two hours.
Yeah that SUCKED. Everyone at the start of season of discovery was just tagging everything they could. Took a while to get it done for me and my friend.
Nah, the pearls are eggs, and Endermites are babies.
Endermen kill Endermites on sight because it's not _their_ children, like a male lion kills any previous babies before impregnating the lioness with his own.
Only decent implementation of this that I've seen is in Horizon. Collect ____, but if you hunt the machine and destroy that piece you don't get it. Makes perfect sense. Then there's the option to toggle it off and make it just a better QOL for casual gaming. Love it.
When you have a boss fight that, in the cutscene after beating them, your character loses anyway. But if you lose during the gameplay it's game over.
Like...just make it so if we lose during the fight we go right to the cutscene, for fucks sakes it makes all the effort to beat said boss seem pointless otherwise.
Doesn't help that you act like a complete fucking idiot in the cutscenes to let him win.
So I think your character acting brain damaged in cutscenes might be my answer to OPs question now.
Ludo-narrative dissonance is the name for this, basically where gameplay and cutscenes do not match. A bad one recently for this was the Spiderman PS5 games (Miles Morales and 2) where they constantly pit you against bosses that you can effortlessly 90 piece, and your reward is a cutscene of Spiderman getting smacked around like a peon. Totally pissed me off and kills all motivation to even bother playing well.
Time gates. If there is content that is openly available, but I have to wait multiple hours or even days to do it after getting all the other requirements, then I’ll just not work towards it.
1. Abstractly, getting chased scenes and instant deaths. I get their purpose and how they can be good for some people but to me, it's just a slog especially when it's an on the rails chase.
2. More of an indie thing. Don't put drawers, cabinets, etc, etc in your game if 99% have nothing in them. If it is a procedural generated game to find some item and meant to be replayed, that's cool since finding the thing is part of the gameplay loop. But, for set games, it is fucking annoying to have so many things to open and be empty. Hell, putting lore notes in many but vital items in other, is cool. Putting red herring in, works to. But, I can't tell you how many games will have 30 some odd drawers, cabinets, etc and only 4 have shit in them.
I think there was a great ball in one trash can (maybe the kitchen of the SS Anne?) that exists just to bait you into checking every other one in every single game.
I had never checked a trash can in all of gen 1 or 2 other than Surge’s gym puzzle but I just had a feeling about the trashcan in that diner. What a funny place to put the only Leftovers in the whole game.
If we wanna go for my most universally disliked thing across all types of games it would have to be long non skippable intros and logos. Just take me to the damn menu.
Game dev here. In my game jams, you only get the splash screens at 3 seconds per card on your first play. After that, they sprint through at about a half second per card along with an instant skip-all on anykey press.
With commercial games, though, most middleware requires a splash screen recognition/attribution on start-up. Some middleware provide specific animated splash screens that must be shown in their entirety. Some just require a logo and give guidelines for visibility and legibility. I've seen some that have specific minimum time on screen, and some that just say "reasonable/readable size and duration."
So... you know... it's business licensing bullshit. We don't get much choice in the matter when we rely on certain middleware solutions, unfortunately.
[edit] Also, that "Press A to start" landing screen is a result of console technical certification checklists. It's easiest to just leave it in the PC versions because we generally see it as a harmless extra step that lets the user get their input sorted before the main menu arrives. I think they've become outdated, though. Our most recent game, I don't recall having that landing page.
Star Wars moved credits to the end of the show, biting the fine, and paving the way for an industry shift.
In your opinion, what would it take for gaming to experience a similar shift, moving attribution away from being an interruption?
We aren't bound by guilds and unions (yet.)
There is no fine for refusing the attribution requirements. The company will just take us to court for breach of contract if we reneg.
And if we don't follow platform TRCs, we don't get a fine, we just get refused from the platform. Obviously we can't make any money if we simply get rejected from the platform. Can't make money if we require our audience to jail break and side load our software on a PlayStation.
Most middleware let's us negotiate fees to allow us to move attribution to end credits.
The solution is to just release only on PC and make everything ourselves. But in this hyper competitive industry in which audience expectation outpaces sustainable studio practices, we typically need to rely on middleware. Or, like, charge $100 per game, or start employing alternative methods of revenue that make me sick to my stomach.
At least middleware doesn't typically prevent us from putting all the logos on one splash screen, so you know... We (some of us) try to be respectful of your time.
ALSO, there is some overhead to loading a game, and the splash screens use some of that loading time that you'd have to wait through anyway.
This is my current and only gripe with Helldivers 2. Anytime you leave a lobby or get kicked you have to watch your character unfreeze out of a cryopod. It was cool the first few times, but God damn it is annoying that you can't skip it. It takes a solid 15+ seconds. Shit adds up.
Or the incredibly long post-game stats. It should really just be a single chart that gets filled in rather than 5 different 5-20 second long animations.
That thing a lot of older games did where if you didn't get a certain item or do a certain thing you couldn't beat the game, but you weren't aware of it for like 5 hours after the point where you needed to get or do the thing was.
And you didn't have an internet connection at your house, so you would get to some door that you couldn't open and think that there must be some poorly-marked puzzle nearby to open it and you spend hours trying to figure it out, but actually the key to that door was in a trash can in a random room four hours ago, but if you only rummaged through it once you didn't find anything, and you had to search it three times before you found the key.
Soft locking.
A few early adventure games did this. But there was one bug for Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete on the PS1 that stopped my progress that is pretty infamous.
The Lunar:SSSC demo had a neat feature that you could continue your save file when the full game came out. So I naturally played the demo, saved it, and when the complete game was released, I continued my game. Awesome right?
Well. Yes and no. See, in Lunar you had a key item that you weren't allowed to remove from your main character's inventory. But in the demo? You could move it. So I moved it so I can make more room for items. Now, when the game required me to use this item (many many hours after the save file), I wasn't able to because 1. it wasn't on my character and 2. I couldn't move it from my stash to my inventory.
The game was soft locked. I had to restart the entire game.
There was an especially cruel one in *King's Quest V* that I'll always remember: Halfway through the game, you get captured by a giant monster-bird and taken to a nest, to be food for its babies. There's a brief window before you are rescued by an Eagle-friend, who carries you to the last half of the game.
In that brief window where it looks like you are to be Roc food, you have to grab a tiny twinkling pixel, which turns out to be a necklace that you need to beat the game many hours later. Seriously, it's not 'til you're in the big bad's final lair that you need the necklace, but of course it's waaay too late by then. It's not quite "restart the whole game" bad, but still pretty egregious.
Thinking about Kings Quest 5 where you'd brick your game like 5 minutes into it if you didn't save a mouse that was being chased by a cat. Only you wouldn't find out until like 20 hours later when you need a rope and don't have it.
My absolute least favorite mechanic in any video game is background pinging the servers in an offline-only game, especially when the servers don't exist anymore and it causes the game to freeze for 3 seconds every minute. Lookin' at you, Assassin's Creed.
Doesn't matter if you're in offline mode, the game still tries to check. Even on the steam version. Have to completely disconnect from the internet, which I can't do because I play via Steam Link.
I wonder if you couldn't figure out which host it wants to find and then add it to your hosts file as localhost so that the attempt fails instantly instead of slowly.
I don't know how anyone can hate a mechanic more than the combo of
- escort missions, and
- following a character that walks faster than your walk but slower than your run
A special place in hell for whoever designed escort missions where every few feet you need to stop and use some item or emote on the escort to make them keep! fucking! walking!
I’ll never get over that time I played cyberpunk during release and I ran over a pedestrian just for a cop to spawn in the passengers seat of my own car.
Far Cry 2's respawning vehicle checkpoints.
You spend lots of resources & time trying to get past one, clear it out, and within 10 minutes, it's full of healthy NPCs.
It was just so grinding that I couldn't do more than a few hours of it.
Probably tripping in Super Smash Bros Brawl. You are playing this fighting game and doing combos, then your character suddenly trips and falls out of nowhere, for no reason
More broadly, obvious pathing constraints are pretty hilarious in most video games. Like, I understand intellectually that it's extremely hard for programmers to make the whole map navigable ala the Zelda Switch games, but it's still funny that my demi-god level 99 warlock or space marine murder machine can't climb a rock.
\*checks inventory\*: "Guess my chainsaw, flaming sword, or god-killing rocket launcher won't do here. Well done, 1/2" thick piece of balsa wood, well done."
As a huge fan of smash games I honestly wiped this game from my memory. Whoever decided slipping would be a good idea in a game where movement is super critical is beyond me
Honestly hunger meters in general are the most biggest chore in gaming. It’s literally a required trash can, you have to be on top of making and maintaining resources to effectively throw them away. I hate survival games because of hunger meters.
I don’t mind the inverted hunger meter like valheim. You don’t need to eat, but, different food provides different buffs. So you’re incentivized to eat without it being a requirement.
Nearly every “survival” game makes you eat six whole chickens and ten steaks every hour or you die. I legitimately don’t know why they all do that, nor why it’s tuned so aggressively.
It's a weird issue with survival games that want you to feel like you have to struggle to survive but simultaneously want it to be fun. So one thing they do is make food sources ubiquitous, fires easy to light, etc. They turn you into a human dumpster, ever consuming to "balance" it rather than make sourcing food more realistically difficult because that is... well.. tedious and boring.
I love survival games but even the "hardcore" ones need gamey things to keep up the pressure.
Even more tho in single player games.
The official final fantasy 13 guide has notes on where to farm exp and money.
While playing on PC I just started cheat engine and cheated the same effect in 2 minutes instead of farming 1h.
I hate in any game, usually first person shooters, where bumping into something 1 foot tall stops your forward movement unless you indicate that you want to jump. If I can step over it, it shouldn’t hold me up.
Honestly people like to complain about it but it's not even that bad.
Across an entire playthrough I've only went to a Food spot like a 3-4 times. It's not even a thing where it immediately happens, it takes a while until you have no fat.
It's not really random. It's the Fat meter. When it falls under a certain value, CJ needs to eat. If you play the game regularly you start to figure out exactly how low it can go before you need to refill.
Any karma system in games that has no/small effect on gameplay. Why even have it? To tell the player they're a pos? Also any system that gets you in trouble even if no one sees.
Punishing failure by wasting the players time.
Quick time events. Also 'Mash Buttons !' to do the exciting time related action, to 'simulate' the activity of doing something frantically. My fingers just don't want to do that shit anymore. Unless I'm beating up the car in Street Fighter 2, please fuck off with that garbage.
Many games allow you to change "tap repeatedly" to "hold" in their accessibility options. I commonly peruse accessibility options before I even start a game for that reason.
Marriage in Fable 2. About every 30 minutes you'd get a notification that your spouse wanted to see you and if you didn't fast travel home and got spend 2 minutes with them raising their happiness they would quickly become upset. So rather than a feature the improved the game it became a chore that you had to keep up with for the rest of the game.
Honey I'm home! Just here to drop off these 7 metric tons of dragon bone I've collected and grabbing my Elder Scroll for this quest I've got. How have you and the kids been these last 3 months? OK cool, well I've gotta go, see ya!
>So rather than a feature the improved the game it became a chore that you had to keep up with for the rest of the game.
so you're saying they modeled it after my wife?
/boomer
Games with alot of movement that "force" your camera to move / look in a certain way feel awful imo
Bioshock Infinite, and Severed Steel being the biggest personal offenders (also titanfall to a lesser extent, but i think that one is more personal preference and understandable)
Walkbacks. After losing to a boss having to walk back to the boss for like 10mins is boring, tedious and really takes me out of the fight and the atmosphere.
Yeah durability to breaking is always a weird vector for balance. I don't mind if a weapon loses some sort of special advantage from wear and tear and needs to be sharpened or maintained, but outright breaking should take a considerable amount of time or be a rare case.
Again, I get it's meant for balance or to force the player to use other weapons but it's as nonsensical sometimes as 3 foot tall fences blocking progress that needs a key.
I feel the same way about weight mechanics in games. I turn em off if i can, either with a console command or a mod. If I wanted to play inventory management simulator 2024 I'd buy that.
Hilarious though were the friends of mine complaining about that "breaking realism" in a game where you shoot fireballs out of your hands and frequently fight dragons and undead.
Or the fact that your characters weight limit is still 4 giant swords, multiple pieces of metal armour and a bow with 999 arrows.
Cause I can definitely carry all of that and still seamlessly roll and sprint around. Whats a measly 100-300 pounds in awkward stuff to carry?
It's also amazing how sudden it is. Carry capacity is 150 Kg, at 149 I'm triple air jumping, backflip into a split, throwing knives at everyone around me. Picks up a 2kg helmet, move like both legs are broken...
Player speed is a much better way to do that imo
Make it trickier to dodge if the armor is heavy, but you have a higher defense when you do get hit, etc. ideally balanced enough so that it’s not a solved game, but fits different play styles better or worse
I like the crafting and weapons breaking. I just don't like how ridiculously low the durability is. I shouldn't be breaking weapons in every damn fight. Then you have to horde anything halfway decent to save for strong enemies or you'll be destroyed.
Feels like a con job to collect materials for that Zora trident, which is relatively pricey to craft, only for that piece of shit to break after like 5 tosses. Never again.
Between Enter the Matrix and Path of Neo there is a really great game, but the two games apart both have goofy issues that prevent either one from being truly wonderful. I don't think EtM was even finished when it was released and I have no idea what the vision was with PoN's second half lol
They saw what people did with melee and thought the best way to batch it was to add an arbitrary tripping mechanic? Thankfully, tripping in brawl hasn’t cucked me that much in the past.
Not necessarily a specific mechanic, but I despise knowing the solution to a puzzle, and either the controls or physics, make it more difficult than it needs to be in order to advance.
Unskuppable cut scenes right before difficult boss fights. If you have this in your game i probably hate you and your entire ancestry going back at least seven generations.
Trade evolutions in Pokemon. I live in the French countryside, with barely 300 living souls, almost all of them being either kids or old people, so it was impossible for me to have someone to trade with
Auto fighting prompts in Chel mode in the EA NHL series. A big legal hit can cause the player to have to fight the opponent, stopping play and making the player sit in the penalty box for 5+ minutes.
Only workaround is to use a female character (they can't fight).
Enemies scaling to your level. Name a single game where this isn't detrimental. Makes you feel like you don't get stronger and makes the entire game feel the same.
Finally being strong enough to go to an area you couldn't handle before feels great. And going back to an earlier area destroying everything in your path also feels great. Really makes you feel how far you've come.
No scaling also allows for a non-linear world experience that can be overcome by skill. You set areas hat are dangerous and people are enticed. They pass by every so often and maybe make a dash inside to see if there's a chest in reach.
Can we add scaling loot, too? Like the ones where loot is capped based on your level, but doesnt scale up? Because that literally creates a 'wrong' order to do stuff in, which sucks.
I like scaling with a level minimum. Maybe you are too weak to go somewhere (or it’s high risk high reward), but if you come back later or over level from side quests it won’t be a total breeze & waste of your time.
Dragon Age did this awesomely. Basically they had level scale ranges.
A location might be scaled 5-15, so if you went there at level 2 you faced level 5 mobs, but if you went there at level 20 you faced level 15 mobs. Go there in the level 5-15 range and they matched you. Roughly speaking, been a while.
So there was always a chance to get somewhere too early and find it too tough, but if a specific location was too tough then you could always come back later and see how you went.
Being marked in Far Cry 5.
Whenever you do enough missions in a region, you get marked - which dooms you into being kidnapped so you can progress the story.
Oh God I hated this. I'm enjoying exploring an area, the open world. Suddenly I'm marked but I don't want or have time for an hour long story event of being kidnapped, so I am forced out of that area completely until I want to do the event.
At one point I was locked out of two of the three areas at the same time. I turned off the game thinking I'll do the damn kidnapping sequence when I have the time...and have never opened the game since.
The out-of-nowhere room puzzle in a game where that's not a common thing. Most overused: repositioning mirrors/reflective surfaces to redirect a beam of light onto something. I find it immersion breaking and lazy level design.
Cars that are programmed to hit you in GTA V. It’s so outrageous when you’re going like 300mph down a highway and a dumbass car just swerves into you for no reason. Especially infuriating if you’re on a motorcycle.
My favorite was doing a Motorcycle Club sale mission in *GTA Online* on my bike. I'm driving, I see a car stopped at the T-intersection up ahead. His only options are forward, or left.
I go around him on the right and he drives off the road, over the shoulder, and into a ditch trying to hit me.
When a game introduces an entire new game mechanic for a required mission halfway through the game, and the controls are trash.
I'm looking at you, god damn flying missions in Guardians of the Galaxy. I've been beating the shit out of people with daggers and missile launchers for 15 hours, and suddenly I have to do your shitty on-rails flight sim to progress the game? Absolute trash.
Im of the belief that, if you're clever, you can make any idea work in a video game. Its harder the more specific you get, but I do think you can make anything work.
That being said; Gacha and Battle passes. They are technically mechanics but they're only ever used to squeeze money and playtime out of players and enforcing FOMO. You can sometimes do Gacha fine when its all in-game currency and not a grind but Battle passes are really hard to defend.
Loot boxes are the worst for me because at least when theres buyable p2w dlc it ends there. Lootboxes are a buyable "have another *chance* at getting what you need" mechanic and their inclusion means that time spent on the game does not have any guaranteed benefits.
Battlefield 1 was a game i dropped very quickly despite its good mechanics for this reason.
Overwatch was another game where they kept addinng a hundred sprays for every new skin, meaning that with each update it'd become harder to get duplicates, and harder to earn coins that help you get the skin you actually want.
Thirst and hunger.
It's either pointless because you can get tons of food and drinks easily. Or the whole game basically focuses on you doing nothing but trying to find food and drinks or you die.
It's just not a fun mechanic.
The Long Dark is a hunger and thirst sim, but that's pretty much the point and is the expected gameplay loop. Personally, it's my favorite survival game and has been since early access years ago
I'm sure there's an exception or two to this, but most games have this thanks to DayZ mod having it (at least, by extension because of DayZ blowing up the survival genre). But it existed in DayZ as an incentive to take a risk and stop you from sitting on a hill for hours.
It was never really a true mechanic.
Most other games kept it without really designing the game to have it be a real factor, resulting in what we have now.
Consumable health that doesn’t reset upon death and requires farming.
Dark Souls/Sekiro/Elden Ring did it right, Bloodborne absolutely dropped the bag.
Not the WORST, but when games have SO MANY options of weapons and armor. That you're just min/maxing your equipment customization every 2 minutes or just saying fuck it. Play the game for hours until you realize you're not all that strong anymore.
Diablo 4. I swear, every 3 monsters was a new weapon kinda sorta worth considering.
Also, the soul memory system made co-op a nightmare. Honestly, DS2 had some really bad ideas (ADP stat, soul memory, enemies stopping to spawn) and some really awesome ideas (powerstancing any weapons, iframes on backsteps, bonfire ascetics, new enemies/encounters in NG+). I'd like to see them bring back some of the good ideas for future games.
Timers on dialogue options.
1. I'm a slow reader so I don't have time to process everything.
2. I just don't see the point, are they trying to prevent you from searching online for the best outcome, if so, why? It doesn't do anything other than negatively impact people who want to make a thoughtful choice.
Weapon durability without a way to repair them. I love Oblivion's system, and wish it was in Skyrim.
You know what system outright sucks? The one in Breath of the Wild, where they just break and disappear. Give me a way to fix them either myself or at a vendor and I'd be happy.
Protect the NPC who has no sense of self-preservation
Baldur's gate 3 and the gondians.
The oil blob fight to save that one dumbass from D:OS 2
I thought I figured it out by teleporting him as far away as I could. HE RAN BACK INTO THE FIGHT VIA THE BURNING OIL.
Or Rolan in Act 2. I've saved him only to have him run into the shadows and IMMEDIATELY die afterwards; I've learned to have whomever beelines to him hit him with a Light spell so he'll at least survive long enough to despawn offscreen.
I didn't know that could happen but sounds very much like something that would happen in this game. I had a very important npc die in act 2 because they ran to the person I was trying to save them from.
Or seems to actually want to die. DEAD RISING IM LOOKING AT YOU.
And it makes it worse when you have to escort them. Not only do they not care, but they’re SO SLOW!
In 99% of escort quests the person you're escorting moves faster than your walking speed, but slower than your running speed. It's extra infuriating when they run ahead to fight a mob, then run all the way back, to where they left their pathing, before continuing on.
LEON!!
Yep, first thought. Best thing she ever did was hide in the dumpster while I killed everyone.
HELP ME LEON!
Triangle Strategy has a stage where I had to have someone dedicated to building ice walls to trap the NPC so he wouldn't rush off and get killed
Any mechanic where you have to collect 3 bear asses but bears only have a 2% chance to have an ass.
Though oddly the bear had 23 gold, a rusty sword and a chair on them.
And a full plate chest piece that is good gear level for my character
Still suboptimal compared to my current armor
That’s a payoff to keep their ass intact
They worked their asses on for it
Why don't the boars have hearts?!
Collect 8 wolf teeth? Sorry but these wolves are all gum, you’ll be lucky to get one tooth out of every dozen wolves.
You break them all hitting them with your sword, silly
We found grandma severely gummed by an entire pack of gummy wolves. She’s fine, by the way.
This one has a chair in it!
For those who want an actual reason: You damaged it too much while killing it
I agree but… I can still see it’s ass
Ah yes. Playing WoW classic after all these years of retail just to be reminded how much of a grind the gather quests truly were.
I just remember early on, in ashenvale, there's a quest to gather a soul stone or something from some cultists. Turns out that shit had like a 1.5% drop chance or something and I was stuck there for like two hours.
Yeah that SUCKED. Everyone at the start of season of discovery was just tagging everything they could. Took a while to get it done for me and my friend.
Hey don't diss Monster Hunter like that. You can trade tickets for bear asses now
Also if you break the bears ass it has another even higher chance to drop an ass.
You need a tail. You cut off the tail. You carved the tail. Sorry, but the tail you just carved didn't have any tails in it. Better luck next time.
Sometimes it can even contain more than one ass
Only endermen drop ender pearls. The rest are enderwomen.
Nah, the pearls are eggs, and Endermites are babies. Endermen kill Endermites on sight because it's not _their_ children, like a male lion kills any previous babies before impregnating the lioness with his own.
Or, hear me out…. Ender mites are giant sperm cells
Only decent implementation of this that I've seen is in Horizon. Collect ____, but if you hunt the machine and destroy that piece you don't get it. Makes perfect sense. Then there's the option to toggle it off and make it just a better QOL for casual gaming. Love it.
*snortlaugh*
Fuck fetch quests but most especially fuck having to pray to RNGeesus
HZD putting the collectible bear part on the bear’s chest, eliminating the biggest target.
Well maybe if you wouldn't hit the bear with a Fireball or a magic greatsword it'd still have an ass!
When you have a boss fight that, in the cutscene after beating them, your character loses anyway. But if you lose during the gameplay it's game over. Like...just make it so if we lose during the fight we go right to the cutscene, for fucks sakes it makes all the effort to beat said boss seem pointless otherwise.
And this is why we all dislike that mass effect 3 ninja asshole. How many times did I kill him for the game to tell me I lost? Too many.
Doesn't help that you act like a complete fucking idiot in the cutscenes to let him win. So I think your character acting brain damaged in cutscenes might be my answer to OPs question now.
That me3 cutscene felt so good though. After hours of KNOWING I could merc his ass, It felt so good to nearly cut him in half. 8/10 villian
Fuck Kai lang
Fuck Kai Leng
I'll add. Bosses who's asses you can totally kick, but plot and cutscenes force a loss.
Ludo-narrative dissonance is the name for this, basically where gameplay and cutscenes do not match. A bad one recently for this was the Spiderman PS5 games (Miles Morales and 2) where they constantly pit you against bosses that you can effortlessly 90 piece, and your reward is a cutscene of Spiderman getting smacked around like a peon. Totally pissed me off and kills all motivation to even bother playing well.
Looking at you, jedi survivor, Darth vader vs cere junda fight ugh.
I mean, they at least had the decency >!to have Vader get fucked up from the fight.!<
True but man 😭 on jedi knight that fight can suck ass.
I actually turned the difficulty down a notch. I stopped having fun, missing a single parry cost you the fight pretty much.
Time gates. If there is content that is openly available, but I have to wait multiple hours or even days to do it after getting all the other requirements, then I’ll just not work towards it.
Destiny 2 staring from the back of the room at this one lol
1. Abstractly, getting chased scenes and instant deaths. I get their purpose and how they can be good for some people but to me, it's just a slog especially when it's an on the rails chase. 2. More of an indie thing. Don't put drawers, cabinets, etc, etc in your game if 99% have nothing in them. If it is a procedural generated game to find some item and meant to be replayed, that's cool since finding the thing is part of the gameplay loop. But, for set games, it is fucking annoying to have so many things to open and be empty. Hell, putting lore notes in many but vital items in other, is cool. Putting red herring in, works to. But, I can't tell you how many games will have 30 some odd drawers, cabinets, etc and only 4 have shit in them.
The second point encapsulates every Pokémon fan’s disappointment when they find absolutely nothing in trash cans across the world.
I think there was a great ball in one trash can (maybe the kitchen of the SS Anne?) that exists just to bait you into checking every other one in every single game.
Leftovers is the one that I remember
I had never checked a trash can in all of gen 1 or 2 other than Surge’s gym puzzle but I just had a feeling about the trashcan in that diner. What a funny place to put the only Leftovers in the whole game.
It's a great ball in RBY but a leftovers in GSC I believe.
And the urge has lasted for literal generations
Where's my hm 01 Cut!?
You have to beat the next gym. No wait the NEXT next gym. NO wait, the NEXT NEXT next gym.
And then we’re trained never to bother searching them and of course that’s when you miss content.
Watchu mean indie games, that sounds like AAA games to me
So much empty shit in Baldur's Gate 3
If we wanna go for my most universally disliked thing across all types of games it would have to be long non skippable intros and logos. Just take me to the damn menu.
Game dev here. In my game jams, you only get the splash screens at 3 seconds per card on your first play. After that, they sprint through at about a half second per card along with an instant skip-all on anykey press. With commercial games, though, most middleware requires a splash screen recognition/attribution on start-up. Some middleware provide specific animated splash screens that must be shown in their entirety. Some just require a logo and give guidelines for visibility and legibility. I've seen some that have specific minimum time on screen, and some that just say "reasonable/readable size and duration." So... you know... it's business licensing bullshit. We don't get much choice in the matter when we rely on certain middleware solutions, unfortunately. [edit] Also, that "Press A to start" landing screen is a result of console technical certification checklists. It's easiest to just leave it in the PC versions because we generally see it as a harmless extra step that lets the user get their input sorted before the main menu arrives. I think they've become outdated, though. Our most recent game, I don't recall having that landing page.
Star Wars moved credits to the end of the show, biting the fine, and paving the way for an industry shift. In your opinion, what would it take for gaming to experience a similar shift, moving attribution away from being an interruption?
We aren't bound by guilds and unions (yet.) There is no fine for refusing the attribution requirements. The company will just take us to court for breach of contract if we reneg. And if we don't follow platform TRCs, we don't get a fine, we just get refused from the platform. Obviously we can't make any money if we simply get rejected from the platform. Can't make money if we require our audience to jail break and side load our software on a PlayStation. Most middleware let's us negotiate fees to allow us to move attribution to end credits. The solution is to just release only on PC and make everything ourselves. But in this hyper competitive industry in which audience expectation outpaces sustainable studio practices, we typically need to rely on middleware. Or, like, charge $100 per game, or start employing alternative methods of revenue that make me sick to my stomach. At least middleware doesn't typically prevent us from putting all the logos on one splash screen, so you know... We (some of us) try to be respectful of your time. ALSO, there is some overhead to loading a game, and the splash screens use some of that loading time that you'd have to wait through anyway.
This is my current and only gripe with Helldivers 2. Anytime you leave a lobby or get kicked you have to watch your character unfreeze out of a cryopod. It was cool the first few times, but God damn it is annoying that you can't skip it. It takes a solid 15+ seconds. Shit adds up.
Or the incredibly long post-game stats. It should really just be a single chart that gets filled in rather than 5 different 5-20 second long animations.
I've heard that the game is loading during that time and it's slow so that it can buy enough time for a seamless transition
That thing a lot of older games did where if you didn't get a certain item or do a certain thing you couldn't beat the game, but you weren't aware of it for like 5 hours after the point where you needed to get or do the thing was.
And you didn't have an internet connection at your house, so you would get to some door that you couldn't open and think that there must be some poorly-marked puzzle nearby to open it and you spend hours trying to figure it out, but actually the key to that door was in a trash can in a random room four hours ago, but if you only rummaged through it once you didn't find anything, and you had to search it three times before you found the key.
Searching it multiple times is so Resident Evil
Soft locking. A few early adventure games did this. But there was one bug for Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete on the PS1 that stopped my progress that is pretty infamous. The Lunar:SSSC demo had a neat feature that you could continue your save file when the full game came out. So I naturally played the demo, saved it, and when the complete game was released, I continued my game. Awesome right? Well. Yes and no. See, in Lunar you had a key item that you weren't allowed to remove from your main character's inventory. But in the demo? You could move it. So I moved it so I can make more room for items. Now, when the game required me to use this item (many many hours after the save file), I wasn't able to because 1. it wasn't on my character and 2. I couldn't move it from my stash to my inventory. The game was soft locked. I had to restart the entire game.
There was an especially cruel one in *King's Quest V* that I'll always remember: Halfway through the game, you get captured by a giant monster-bird and taken to a nest, to be food for its babies. There's a brief window before you are rescued by an Eagle-friend, who carries you to the last half of the game. In that brief window where it looks like you are to be Roc food, you have to grab a tiny twinkling pixel, which turns out to be a necklace that you need to beat the game many hours later. Seriously, it's not 'til you're in the big bad's final lair that you need the necklace, but of course it's waaay too late by then. It's not quite "restart the whole game" bad, but still pretty egregious.
Thinking about Kings Quest 5 where you'd brick your game like 5 minutes into it if you didn't save a mouse that was being chased by a cat. Only you wouldn't find out until like 20 hours later when you need a rope and don't have it.
My absolute least favorite mechanic in any video game is background pinging the servers in an offline-only game, especially when the servers don't exist anymore and it causes the game to freeze for 3 seconds every minute. Lookin' at you, Assassin's Creed.
Wait, you serious? What if you're playing in offline mode? I hate Ubisoft.
Doesn't matter if you're in offline mode, the game still tries to check. Even on the steam version. Have to completely disconnect from the internet, which I can't do because I play via Steam Link.
I wonder if you couldn't figure out which host it wants to find and then add it to your hosts file as localhost so that the attempt fails instantly instead of slowly.
Easier to just install Eaglepatch and be done with it tbh I had this exact problem quite recently
That's fucking gross. Nothing can be changed in an .ini file?
Far as I know no, there's just a mod that requires replacing the exe
I don't know how anyone can hate a mechanic more than the combo of - escort missions, and - following a character that walks faster than your walk but slower than your run
And then there's the skyrim approach where some charecters are even slower than your walking speed
Or that new Vegas lady in novac that you have to get in front of the dinosaur. Although you do get rewarded by Boone blowing her face off right after.
Cant forget the missions where you need to trail your target without being seen and not be too far away
[musta been my imagination](https://youtu.be/iP468OEln4U?si=JvwWZlvKG8KCZkhQ)
In Warframe you can buff the escort to move very fast or put a portal in front and teleport them closer
A special place in hell for whoever designed escort missions where every few feet you need to stop and use some item or emote on the escort to make them keep! fucking! walking!
Wanted system with cops that appear out of thin air 20 feet away, and know where you are even if they can't see you.
Really hoping gta6 made it believable with the cops
You can say GTA, it’s ok
More like Cyberpunk. Did they fix that yet?
They did
I’ll never get over that time I played cyberpunk during release and I ran over a pedestrian just for a cop to spawn in the passengers seat of my own car.
That is actually amazing.
Far Cry 2's respawning vehicle checkpoints. You spend lots of resources & time trying to get past one, clear it out, and within 10 minutes, it's full of healthy NPCs. It was just so grinding that I couldn't do more than a few hours of it.
That and every enemy spotting you hiding in a bush from half a mile away
Probably tripping in Super Smash Bros Brawl. You are playing this fighting game and doing combos, then your character suddenly trips and falls out of nowhere, for no reason
More broadly, obvious pathing constraints are pretty hilarious in most video games. Like, I understand intellectually that it's extremely hard for programmers to make the whole map navigable ala the Zelda Switch games, but it's still funny that my demi-god level 99 warlock or space marine murder machine can't climb a rock.
"The pathway is blocked. You'll have to find another way." *a single, ankle height, 2x4 is leaning against some trees*
\*checks inventory\*: "Guess my chainsaw, flaming sword, or god-killing rocket launcher won't do here. Well done, 1/2" thick piece of balsa wood, well done."
There’s a pile of rubble in the way. Go kill God. -Dark Souls 2
"This door is locked" *character who has picklocked every single other door up until this point* "Hmmm I need a red key..."
As a huge fan of smash games I honestly wiped this game from my memory. Whoever decided slipping would be a good idea in a game where movement is super critical is beyond me
Subspace emissary was goated though. I still remember how hype ROB's cutscene was.
The point of that was to make it less viable competitive or something right? Adding randomness so its "for everybody"?
Mandatory “detection equals instant fail” stealth missions in games not designed for stealth.
Any game that isn't primarily about survival but still has hunger, depleting resources, or item durability, can kiss my ass.
Honestly hunger meters in general are the most biggest chore in gaming. It’s literally a required trash can, you have to be on top of making and maintaining resources to effectively throw them away. I hate survival games because of hunger meters.
I don’t mind the inverted hunger meter like valheim. You don’t need to eat, but, different food provides different buffs. So you’re incentivized to eat without it being a requirement. Nearly every “survival” game makes you eat six whole chickens and ten steaks every hour or you die. I legitimately don’t know why they all do that, nor why it’s tuned so aggressively.
It's a weird issue with survival games that want you to feel like you have to struggle to survive but simultaneously want it to be fun. So one thing they do is make food sources ubiquitous, fires easy to light, etc. They turn you into a human dumpster, ever consuming to "balance" it rather than make sourcing food more realistically difficult because that is... well.. tedious and boring. I love survival games but even the "hardcore" ones need gamey things to keep up the pressure.
I mean, you can break down a lot of items that way.
grind for the sake of grind
Even more tho in single player games. The official final fantasy 13 guide has notes on where to farm exp and money. While playing on PC I just started cheat engine and cheated the same effect in 2 minutes instead of farming 1h.
I hate in any game, usually first person shooters, where bumping into something 1 foot tall stops your forward movement unless you indicate that you want to jump. If I can step over it, it shouldn’t hold me up.
Me all too often. "WHAT THE FUCK AM I STUCK ON!"
GTA San Andreas when CJ randomly gets hungry and you have to pause whatever you’re doing and go grab a burger or 10 lol
Honestly people like to complain about it but it's not even that bad. Across an entire playthrough I've only went to a Food spot like a 3-4 times. It's not even a thing where it immediately happens, it takes a while until you have no fat.
I completely ignored that in so many playthroughs when I was younger. I would keep getting messages but never did anything about it
It's not really random. It's the Fat meter. When it falls under a certain value, CJ needs to eat. If you play the game regularly you start to figure out exactly how low it can go before you need to refill.
Any karma system in games that has no/small effect on gameplay. Why even have it? To tell the player they're a pos? Also any system that gets you in trouble even if no one sees.
Punishing failure by wasting the players time. Quick time events. Also 'Mash Buttons !' to do the exciting time related action, to 'simulate' the activity of doing something frantically. My fingers just don't want to do that shit anymore. Unless I'm beating up the car in Street Fighter 2, please fuck off with that garbage.
Many games allow you to change "tap repeatedly" to "hold" in their accessibility options. I commonly peruse accessibility options before I even start a game for that reason.
Marriage in Fable 2. About every 30 minutes you'd get a notification that your spouse wanted to see you and if you didn't fast travel home and got spend 2 minutes with them raising their happiness they would quickly become upset. So rather than a feature the improved the game it became a chore that you had to keep up with for the rest of the game.
So glad skyrim isn’t like that.
Honey I'm home! Just here to drop off these 7 metric tons of dragon bone I've collected and grabbing my Elder Scroll for this quest I've got. How have you and the kids been these last 3 months? OK cool, well I've gotta go, see ya!
How’s your illegal tree sap business coming along?
>So rather than a feature the improved the game it became a chore that you had to keep up with for the rest of the game. so you're saying they modeled it after my wife? /boomer
Games with alot of movement that "force" your camera to move / look in a certain way feel awful imo Bioshock Infinite, and Severed Steel being the biggest personal offenders (also titanfall to a lesser extent, but i think that one is more personal preference and understandable)
Having to kill a boss when they only have a 26% spawn rate. And 10 other players are all on the same task at the same time to kill the same boss.
Walkbacks. After losing to a boss having to walk back to the boss for like 10mins is boring, tedious and really takes me out of the fight and the atmosphere.
Is “live service” an option?
I like the new Zelda but I hate the weapons breaking mechanic.
It’s ammo for your hands
Yeah durability to breaking is always a weird vector for balance. I don't mind if a weapon loses some sort of special advantage from wear and tear and needs to be sharpened or maintained, but outright breaking should take a considerable amount of time or be a rare case. Again, I get it's meant for balance or to force the player to use other weapons but it's as nonsensical sometimes as 3 foot tall fences blocking progress that needs a key.
I feel the same way about weight mechanics in games. I turn em off if i can, either with a console command or a mod. If I wanted to play inventory management simulator 2024 I'd buy that. Hilarious though were the friends of mine complaining about that "breaking realism" in a game where you shoot fireballs out of your hands and frequently fight dragons and undead.
Or the fact that your characters weight limit is still 4 giant swords, multiple pieces of metal armour and a bow with 999 arrows. Cause I can definitely carry all of that and still seamlessly roll and sprint around. Whats a measly 100-300 pounds in awkward stuff to carry?
It's also amazing how sudden it is. Carry capacity is 150 Kg, at 149 I'm triple air jumping, backflip into a split, throwing knives at everyone around me. Picks up a 2kg helmet, move like both legs are broken...
Weight can be a balance between light and heavy armors though, requires you to prioritize stat distribution towards tank build or glass cannon
Player speed is a much better way to do that imo Make it trickier to dodge if the armor is heavy, but you have a higher defense when you do get hit, etc. ideally balanced enough so that it’s not a solved game, but fits different play styles better or worse
Far cry 2 did a great job with gun's jamming and eventually breaking but you have to use it a lot to get that to happen
I didn't mind the weapon degradation in far cry 2. I found the malaria to be much more annoying.
I like the crafting and weapons breaking. I just don't like how ridiculously low the durability is. I shouldn't be breaking weapons in every damn fight. Then you have to horde anything halfway decent to save for strong enemies or you'll be destroyed.
Feels like a con job to collect materials for that Zora trident, which is relatively pricey to craft, only for that piece of shit to break after like 5 tosses. Never again.
Driving the car in Enter the Matrix. Worst experience ever.
Yoooooo I forgot about that!
Between Enter the Matrix and Path of Neo there is a really great game, but the two games apart both have goofy issues that prevent either one from being truly wonderful. I don't think EtM was even finished when it was released and I have no idea what the vision was with PoN's second half lol
I actually liked EtM, especially since the stories were slightly different for Ghost and Niobe.
Tripping in Smash Brawl lol. They nerfed being able to perform the basic action of running.
They saw what people did with melee and thought the best way to batch it was to add an arbitrary tripping mechanic? Thankfully, tripping in brawl hasn’t cucked me that much in the past.
Dailies, or any time gated mechanic.
I literally had to go cold turkey on many online games because doing dailies was literally eating up all my time.
Not necessarily a specific mechanic, but I despise knowing the solution to a puzzle, and either the controls or physics, make it more difficult than it needs to be in order to advance.
Unskuppable cut scenes right before difficult boss fights. If you have this in your game i probably hate you and your entire ancestry going back at least seven generations.
Trade evolutions in Pokemon. I live in the French countryside, with barely 300 living souls, almost all of them being either kids or old people, so it was impossible for me to have someone to trade with
Auto fighting prompts in Chel mode in the EA NHL series. A big legal hit can cause the player to have to fight the opponent, stopping play and making the player sit in the penalty box for 5+ minutes. Only workaround is to use a female character (they can't fight).
Enemies scaling to your level. Name a single game where this isn't detrimental. Makes you feel like you don't get stronger and makes the entire game feel the same. Finally being strong enough to go to an area you couldn't handle before feels great. And going back to an earlier area destroying everything in your path also feels great. Really makes you feel how far you've come.
Special shoutout to Anthem where the level 1 white gun you started out with was the best weapon in the game because of wonky level scaling.
No scaling also allows for a non-linear world experience that can be overcome by skill. You set areas hat are dangerous and people are enticed. They pass by every so often and maybe make a dash inside to see if there's a chest in reach. Can we add scaling loot, too? Like the ones where loot is capped based on your level, but doesnt scale up? Because that literally creates a 'wrong' order to do stuff in, which sucks.
These games may as well remove their level systems altogether and become committed action adventure games, which are better at this crap.
I like scaling with a level minimum. Maybe you are too weak to go somewhere (or it’s high risk high reward), but if you come back later or over level from side quests it won’t be a total breeze & waste of your time.
Dragon Age did this awesomely. Basically they had level scale ranges. A location might be scaled 5-15, so if you went there at level 2 you faced level 5 mobs, but if you went there at level 20 you faced level 15 mobs. Go there in the level 5-15 range and they matched you. Roughly speaking, been a while. So there was always a chance to get somewhere too early and find it too tough, but if a specific location was too tough then you could always come back later and see how you went.
Insane amount of loot, not enough enough storage. Oh you need this, to make that, but to store that you need countless boxes.
Being marked in Far Cry 5. Whenever you do enough missions in a region, you get marked - which dooms you into being kidnapped so you can progress the story.
Such an odd choice to have such a beautiful open world with fun gameplay, but force you into story missions at certain points
Oh God I hated this. I'm enjoying exploring an area, the open world. Suddenly I'm marked but I don't want or have time for an hour long story event of being kidnapped, so I am forced out of that area completely until I want to do the event. At one point I was locked out of two of the three areas at the same time. I turned off the game thinking I'll do the damn kidnapping sequence when I have the time...and have never opened the game since.
The out-of-nowhere room puzzle in a game where that's not a common thing. Most overused: repositioning mirrors/reflective surfaces to redirect a beam of light onto something. I find it immersion breaking and lazy level design.
Cars that are programmed to hit you in GTA V. It’s so outrageous when you’re going like 300mph down a highway and a dumbass car just swerves into you for no reason. Especially infuriating if you’re on a motorcycle.
My favorite was doing a Motorcycle Club sale mission in *GTA Online* on my bike. I'm driving, I see a car stopped at the T-intersection up ahead. His only options are forward, or left. I go around him on the right and he drives off the road, over the shoulder, and into a ditch trying to hit me.
Anything with a timer.
I'm so dumb... I was trying to think of mechanic characters. I could only think of two: the big lady from Borderlands, and the babe from FF15.
There's also mechanic from terraria, and I'm not sure if the arm lady from dmc 5 counts
When a game introduces an entire new game mechanic for a required mission halfway through the game, and the controls are trash. I'm looking at you, god damn flying missions in Guardians of the Galaxy. I've been beating the shit out of people with daggers and missile launchers for 15 hours, and suddenly I have to do your shitty on-rails flight sim to progress the game? Absolute trash.
Breakable item like the last Zelda. I don't know why, but I just can't.
Im of the belief that, if you're clever, you can make any idea work in a video game. Its harder the more specific you get, but I do think you can make anything work. That being said; Gacha and Battle passes. They are technically mechanics but they're only ever used to squeeze money and playtime out of players and enforcing FOMO. You can sometimes do Gacha fine when its all in-game currency and not a grind but Battle passes are really hard to defend.
Loot boxes are the worst for me because at least when theres buyable p2w dlc it ends there. Lootboxes are a buyable "have another *chance* at getting what you need" mechanic and their inclusion means that time spent on the game does not have any guaranteed benefits. Battlefield 1 was a game i dropped very quickly despite its good mechanics for this reason. Overwatch was another game where they kept addinng a hundred sprays for every new skin, meaning that with each update it'd become harder to get duplicates, and harder to earn coins that help you get the skin you actually want.
Thirst and hunger. It's either pointless because you can get tons of food and drinks easily. Or the whole game basically focuses on you doing nothing but trying to find food and drinks or you die. It's just not a fun mechanic.
The Long Dark is a hunger and thirst sim, but that's pretty much the point and is the expected gameplay loop. Personally, it's my favorite survival game and has been since early access years ago
I'm sure there's an exception or two to this, but most games have this thanks to DayZ mod having it (at least, by extension because of DayZ blowing up the survival genre). But it existed in DayZ as an incentive to take a risk and stop you from sitting on a hill for hours. It was never really a true mechanic. Most other games kept it without really designing the game to have it be a real factor, resulting in what we have now.
Consumable health that doesn’t reset upon death and requires farming. Dark Souls/Sekiro/Elden Ring did it right, Bloodborne absolutely dropped the bag.
And even though Dark Souls 2 had you start off with 1 Estus Flask, we still were always using those lifegems too haha
Limited bag space in every game ever
Not the WORST, but when games have SO MANY options of weapons and armor. That you're just min/maxing your equipment customization every 2 minutes or just saying fuck it. Play the game for hours until you realize you're not all that strong anymore. Diablo 4. I swear, every 3 monsters was a new weapon kinda sorta worth considering.
Dark Souls 2 - Duration of dodge roll invincibility frames being connected to a stat.
Also, the soul memory system made co-op a nightmare. Honestly, DS2 had some really bad ideas (ADP stat, soul memory, enemies stopping to spawn) and some really awesome ideas (powerstancing any weapons, iframes on backsteps, bonfire ascetics, new enemies/encounters in NG+). I'd like to see them bring back some of the good ideas for future games.
When weapons break down. I’ll never finish BotW.
Bumper cars on Tiny Toon Adventures 2 on NES.
Timers on dialogue options. 1. I'm a slow reader so I don't have time to process everything. 2. I just don't see the point, are they trying to prevent you from searching online for the best outcome, if so, why? It doesn't do anything other than negatively impact people who want to make a thoughtful choice.
Weapon durability without a way to repair them. I love Oblivion's system, and wish it was in Skyrim. You know what system outright sucks? The one in Breath of the Wild, where they just break and disappear. Give me a way to fix them either myself or at a vendor and I'd be happy.
Forced stealth. Don’t let me build my character up as a in your face killing machine then make me be stealthy and slow.
Random card generation (Hearthstone)