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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Combo attacks - I’m not coordinated to hit the buttons in order fast enough. I tried Black Desert when it was free and this was the dealbreaker for me, though it wasn’t the only thing that bugged me about the game.
I played Icey for a bit and it had combo attacks and I was like “I do not have the brain capacity for this shit” and quit. The narrator was terrible too.
This is why I hated Jedi Fallen Order.
Grinding to advance and make the game easier.
Looking at you fdev with Elite Dangerous, or Rockstar and GTA.
Having balance and not level locking stuff is hard I get that. And you have people that will burn though content like it’s a free crackpipe. But it basically makes a lot of adults or people that just play games casually or in moderation just not fun
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.
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.
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.
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 = ($o$)
I’m not a big fan of fishing mechanics, they’re usually shallow “press button at random signal, get a random prize” mechanics.
Also escort missions where the NPC being escorted does not understand that it should protect its own life. I don’t mind repeating a mission due to my own mistakes, but I don’t want to do it because some AI went potato.
nah man fishing mini games are THE SHIT
it’s not about gameplay it’s about vibes It’s just so calming
As long as they’re not required for progression. I find it quite boring and just want to get over it already.
Hahaha, about fishing mechanics: In the game Sonic Adventure I remember spending a lot of effort with Big’s Fishing Levels. The only thing that made it worth it was the banger tune when reeling in the fish.
feebas flashbacks
I give props to Warframe for being the only game that made fishing fun for me. ‘Waiting’ is an element, but only because you’re fishing with a harpoon and you’ll want to line up your shot. The water populates with fish pretty quickly, and it feels far more interactive.
Fishing is pretty interesting to discuss in terms of a game mechanic in terms of enjoyablity since it seems like a very marmite “you love it or hate it” sort of deal and seems to pop up in lots of games. Some people love it precisely because of its slow-paced, chill nature. I quite enjoyed it when I played some of the MMO’s that have a fishing profession as a pretty low energy thing to do when I wanted to focus on talking to guildies or doing some other thing in the background.
Stealth. I hate hiding and creeping around waiting for an NPC to move. It’s like, “oh, you want to play the game? How about not playing the game instead?” Infuriating.
I feel like most games get it wrong and just make you stay in one place waiting for the enemy dude to slowly make his route as you map it in your head. It’s just boring, I don’t know.
A nice way to change that would be to give a button that gives you a “top view” map of the enemies’s movement maybe, to make it a little bit puzzle-y. Or, if you want to make it more “action-y”, give the player a way to hide or disengage by scrambling to find something in the environment that allows them to do that, when they get detected.
Stealth is just implemented in a terrible way in most modern games I feel like. Makes it not fun.
I love the shit out of stealth. The last of us, metal gear solid, and sniper elite are some of my favorite games because of the stealth.
If your game isn’t built for stealth it’s basically universally a disaster, though. If you don’t have tools to manipulate enemies, and AI where stealth is a functional element of the rest of the game, you shouldn’t have stealth sections. They’re a lock to be a trainwreck.
This was why MGS was so good.
Hitman is one of my favorite stealth games in this way.
I don’t mind stealth as a concept in a game, but I hate forced stealth in games that aren’t like, Thief or whatever. Let me choose to be stealthy, or let me choose to be creative, or go in guns blazing, etc. If you want me to use stealth, give me a very good reason why the alternatives are much worse. It’s so frustrating to just get a “Game Over” because someone saw you.
I think forced stealth mechanics in games not designed for them are my pet peeve. Looking at you Witcher 2.
Yes, yes and more yes. Even worse in co-op or MMO games where there’s always one smug friend who does it first time while you’re laying dead on the floor after your 32nd attempt…
I hate stealth mechanics in general, it is just not my type of gameplay. It is the reason I stopped playing Death Stranding, although I loved everything else in it, but being forced to use stealth mechanics was so off-putting to me, I just stopped playing and can’t go back.
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Slow, boring climbing sections that add nothing to the game and just pad out playtime. I’m looking at you, God of War (2018).
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Lives systems. Luckily modern games never use it anymore, but every now and then I play an older game and wow, losing 30+ minutes of progress just because you died a few times SUCKS.
Slow movement systems are often hiding loading screens. Hard to say if we’ll see those transition out as SSDs become more popular.
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Repeateable procedural quests. I feel like [this](https://youtu.be/5C3mvRm0aOY https://youtu.be/5C3mvRm0aOY) explains it all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
QuickTime events. I started replaying RE4 original. Did not miss them.
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!
Story, specifically cutscenes, especially if they’re unskippable. Everything I need to know should simply be presented in the HUD or in the menu/options/inventory/etc. It’s fine that there /is/ a story but at least give me the option of skipping it entirely and playing the actual game.
I like story heavy games so I personally don’t mind unskippable cut scenes… the first time around. What reeeaaaaally annoys me is when it’s a game with multiple endings and I can’t skip the same cut scenes on future playthroughs.
Same when it’s a reading-heavy multiple ending game, but it won’t let me skip text that I’ve seen already.
Perhaps forced online with no way to self host.
Gacha. I can tolerate lootboxes but when lootboxes are the central feature, I’m out.
The only good implement is the Zelda ToTK gacha machines. All the fun of gacha with none of the monetary expense!
Nintendo is the only company i know that gets it right. Most of their gachas are for optional collectibles and you can rig the odds in your favor by filling the machines with tokens you collect in-game
