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Holding a button to do anything/everything. I can see the logic of where it may be useful, but it doesn’t need to be used for everything. So damn annoying.
*Oh, and similarly, forcing excessive submenus to do basic things, like continue a save from the main menu. That should be one, maybe two button presses, not 4+ along with a confirmation. I’ll never understand games with stuff like that.
No Man’s Sky is a repeat offender for both of those things. How they’ve released constant major updates for a decade but never taken the time to fix their terrible user interface is one of life’s great mysteries.
Alien pods getting a free move as soon as you uncover them
What is this, some X-COM game?
Yep!
Grinding.
When the game progresses naturally, and as you move through the game, you always find yourself in the right spot to overcome the next obstacle, that’s great. But the second I have to stop progressing through the game and go spend 6 hours killing goblins, I’m done.
Escort missions. Specifically when the person you are escorting is as sharp as a bag of hammers.
And they move very, very slowly…
Or, worse, they’re very fast and just run headlong into death…
Or even worse, they move slightly slower than your run speed but slightly faster than your walk speed
This one. What the fuck, devs?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
even worse when its part of a setup where you are escorting but you have team members with missions that they can’t do and you have to do them in a ship that is slow and you have to fly long distances to do what they were supposed to do but get back to defend your escort. Yes im talking about y-wing missions in the x-wing game.
How about the release broken game then finish the game way after release… if you’re lucky mechanic?
Gamers and investors both incentivize this unfortunately and apparently regulators are cool with straight up fraud too.
Ill never forgive no man’s sky, no matter how much they fixed it after.
They were openly fraudulent and got away with it.
Often it’s climbing.
I’m looking at you, breath of the wild.
Speaking of botw, lots to explore and find… And none of it is worthwhile or actually affect the gameplay in any real way.
Especially when it’s the excuse for the massive world that takes forever to traverse.
And now let’s convince the entire industry that this blight is a good idea and shoehorn it in to everything
Completing botw became more of a chore than anything else. I couldn’t get all the way through tears of the kingdom. The chores in that one just compounded. I managed to somehow light up the entire underworld and yet my gear was too fucking terrible to face the end bosses.
Botw was very cool at times, but it had a few things that made it utterly frustrating to play. The weapons breaking and having to watch Link go “uhh eeefff eeeff ooof” on the side of a cliff for hours was just painful and purposeless.
To your point, it seems like no game can manage to have an expansive, explorable world that’s actually rewarding to explore. Maybe there is an exception out there but I haven’t encountered it.
Elden Ring has done it best so far, particularly the dlc, but it also obliterated the replay value compared to other souls games with how much empty traversal it adds and now that you can go anywhere you know what’s available and wind up googling where things are instead of making do with your limited options as you go.
The indie game Sable had brilliant climbing mechanics. You have limited climbing like in most games, but you literally don’t need the extended climbing range for almost the entirety of the main game except for like one or two not-required missions, you only really need it to collect all of the collectables that extend your climbing range. You know how I know? I didn’t find the way to extend climbing range until like the very end of the game. Somehow completely skipped over it!
If only it was climbing. BOTW was more like “oh there was light rain recently so fuck you, no access up here.”
For me: weapon durability.
I generally hate it, too, but thought it felt pretty fitting and okay in RDR2.
Far Cry 2 as well. Low durability didn’t break your weapon, it just increased the chance of a misfire or jam and made combat more chaotic. And if it really bothered you, you could always buy a simple AK (which was practically indestructible when upgraded).
I dunno, my mind changed a bit on this once I played BotW. As long as weapons are significantly different enough and there’s always ways to be effective with each, and you get a non-stop slew of them to rotate through, it’s fun.
If you lose any of the above conditions though and you’re just constantly trying to repair your weapon set, needing to pack stupid numbers of repair kits or stop at the corner store in town or whatever to repair your only set, that’s a no from me dawg.
But it can be fun. When I first played BotW I was really frustrated about durability until I complained about it to my friend and he was like “dude who cares, just pick up one of the 20 weapons laying on the ground and keep moving” I realized that I no longer need to hoard all the best weapons and I could just send it, and the game got way more fun.
That being said, most games do it poorly and 90% of the time I agree with you. Looking at YOU dead Island 2
I was thinking specifically of Breath of the Wild.
For me, Zelda has always been about scratching my completionist itch.
Making all the weapons temporary means I never get to feel the power of a completed inventory. Instead I’m just trading off weapons that I don’t like for more weapons that I don’t like. And if I do like one, it breaks anyway.
I didn’t even bother with Tears of the Kingdom for that reason. It’s a feel-bad mechanic, and I’d rather not do it.
I can understand why it was polarizing. The game for sure broke a lot of norms in the franchise, and I too wasn’t happy about that at first, because it didn’t meet my initial expectations. But I think the weapon system is designed to encourage the player to explore the game mechanics, which if you just stick with one type of weapon you miss so much of, so I think it’s important to the game that they had it the way they did.
But yeah, I remember hating it at first so I definitely get it. My perspective changed but I totally understand if it never worked for you.
Ah another one - Forced stealth sections where you can’t be detected at all. Especially in a game where stealth is optional or not even a thing you can really do normally.
The forced stealth level early on is what keeps me from replaying Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
Microtransactions
Poorly done procedural generation where it’s a waste of time to explore. The first Remnant was pretty bad about this, with small setpieces scattered throughout the levels that looked interesting but usually only contained basic enemies and one or two empty pots. Filling out the map was a chore that was almost never worth the effort - almost never because sometimes there was a unique drop hidden in a level just to screw over anyone who got sick of fighting through hundreds of empty buildings and decided to stick to the main path.
Starfield did more of this. What a dud that was!
Bethesda’s random leveled loot is another contender for worst mechanic. It was always fun picking the lock on a master-level chest deep in a dungeon only to find thirteen coins and a wooden spoon inside.
“Some may call this junk. Me, I call it treasure.” could be a line from their design document.
I don’t like durability mechanics when its clearly there just to waste your time or money or whatever. Any game that makes you do more hiking to repair benches than fighting is either getting a thumbs down or I’m going to download a mod.
It is a fine line, like in Minecraft durability obviously makes sense, so it makes sense that other games try to emulate that. But then look at Stardew Valley, one of the most popular mods is the one that stops fences from degrading because repairing them is tedious.
Can you make fences out of stone or metal, or just wood, in SV? Because I recall Harvest Moon DS allowed you to make stone fences, which were a lot more likely to survive hurricanes and snowstorms
Breath of the Wild is generally pretty good about letting you explore your own way. For example, the exposition ghost at the start explicitly acknowledges you could go straight to the final boss after leaving the tutorial area if you want, and there are plenty of ways a determined player can reach areas faster than the typical progression routes would take them.
But my goodness the pitiful weapon durability made me want to avoid combat. I distinctly remember coming across a white lionel relatively early and determining I shouldn’t bother trying to fight simply because I didn’t have enough weapons to get through its health bar.
Yup. I played through BotW always holding onto things I thought were good because the stupid durability mechanic made me hoard stuff.
When I started TotK I decided to turn durability off and see if I enjoyed more and I absolutely did. Made the game way better. The only thing that broke was some balancing around crafted weapons. For example you can take a stick and slap a horn on it and get a very powerful, but brittle, weapon. With durability off it just becomes a very powerful weapon, which pretty much matches or beats any proper weapon you can find. If you think that’s too hacky you can just make a rule for yourself not to craft things like that.
Many games have gone through this and time and time again scarcity makes people not use things. In Witcher 2 you had to craft potions manually by collecting all the ingredients each time. In Witcher 3 they just replenish after a rest if you have alcohol on you. 2 is more realistic, but the work involved (and the fact that you had to drink them before combat started) made them too much of a pain and I just went without. In 3 you can simply use them and not worry.
I played BotW with 4x durability mod and it was soooo much better.
I expected to do the same for TotK, but the fusion system made things infinitely more durable than the breaking garbage weapons of BotW, so I didn’t have to mod durability in.
Lootboxes
INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE
The worst game mechanic is artificial difficulty where enemies aren’t challenging. Instead, they are just damage sponges.
Sports games pretty much stopped progressing entirely when the “ultimate team” cancer spread.
