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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Controversial opinion but I mostly hate crafting. I feel like it’s a huge time sink just to make you waste time in the game. It’s not content at all just mindless farming for no real reason.
There are games where the whole game revolves around it so you couldn’t really remove it from those games. Minecraft is an example.
But I feel like every single game now has some kind of crafting mechanics. Mainly the F2P to get some kind of weird limitation that will either take you half a lifetime to accomplish or $5…
Most open-world games have areas on the map that are blank until you “explore” them by climbing a tower of some kind and “activating” that region on your map.
This results in trudging blindly into the middle of every new area, ignoring interesting stuff along the way and beelining to the tower just so you can see the damn map. It’s an annoyingly unnatural way to explore.
I didn’t even realize that I disliked it until I played Far Cry 6, which has a much more organic and immersive landmark discovery process. You learn locations of interest from readables and by talking to friendly NPCs that you encounter in the world.
In FC6 it’s even thematic, since you’re guerilla fighters passing intel along by word of mouth.
Edit: sp
I know it’s a popular mechanic that lots of people love, but I really don’t like games where you die a lot, or where death has significant impact. I generally play games to chill out and just have fun and I often feel like games are punishing me when that happens and I find myself doing sort of “risk management” and becoming a hermit in the game.
I love shooters but I can’t do fortnight or any game mode that CS-esque because I need that respawn
People have said escort quests but I’m going to go more specific.
Escort quests WHERE THE NPC INEXPLICABLY HAS A DIFFERENT WALKING/RUNNING SPEED THAN THE PLAYER…
I think it was on one of the Half-Life 2 developer commentary where they mention that the made the NPC move faster than your walking speed, but slower than your running speed, so that you are able to catch up with them if you stay behind to look at something. If they move at your running speed, you are kinda forced to follow them all the time, and any obstacle will separate you more and more from the NPC that you are supposed to escort.
But that feels terrible if you want to follow them without stopping (or in the case of obstacles, are able to).
Even Ocarina of Time, in 1998, got this right. The Dampe race, which isn’t technically an escort, would feel weird if Dampe was too much faster or slower than you, because it would feel unfair. But not everyone moves as fast while playing - some people like rolling, which is a different speed from walking, etc. Also, he throws fireballs at you, and players who are less good at dodging them will end up being slower. So Dampe doesn’t “follow you,” (in fact, he spends most of the thing in front of you), but he has a rubber band effect. If you get too far behind, he slows down. If you get too far ahead, he speeds up. This does a good job of keeping him in view, which helps give the feeling that you’re going at an intended pace, whatever reasonable pace you take. If you’re too slow, you will fail, but… it pretty much requires standing still or getting hit by lots of fireballs.
In contrast, the Yunobo escort in BOTW feels terrible casually and even worse to speedrun. He’s faster than you walk, but much, MUCH slower than you run. And if you get too far ahead of him? He stops.
I have yet to play a game where NPCs have the same speed as the player, have you? I get it on the game design level, since NPCs need to move at a speed that their animations look natural at but player characters need to move fast enough to not feel frustrating to the character.
I have yet to play a game where NPCs have the same speed as the player, have you?
RDR2 did an excellent job with this by making it more of a pseudo cutscene. You can just hold a button and your character will match the target speed.
That seems great. I have RDR2 on my wishlist but unfortunately it would require more storage space than my entire laptop has at the moment.
When you enter a level and the camera pans over every important thing in the level before you can move. I’m not an idiot. I can discover the level on my own. Stop holding my hand.
Daily quests or login rewards, things to force me to play the game, always stop playing
The bit in the RPG when your character gets captured and you lose all your gear, and have to do the shitty stealth thing.
I hate how in a lot of retro games water kills you instanly.
Probably simple, mindless side/fetch quests. Defeat enemies, get loot, run it back, rinse and repeat. It also is incredibly dry to watch as well as actually do yourself.
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.
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.
Nintendo’s inability to make things easy like crafting multiple items at once in BotW/TotK and Animal Crossing
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
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.
Anything where the player is essentially a superhero, I like summers though…
