You must log in or # to comment.
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.
Game has collectables scattered in almost every room including lore text and audio logs.
Meanwhile the story NPC is nagging you to move on every 30 seconds on a loop and won’t shut the fuck up. Because play testing revealed most of their players are fucking morons and get lost in one way apartment rooms I guess.
These two mechanics conflct with one another way too often and it’s immersion breaking every time.
Insert real world money to continue/for advantage. Whether it’s modern FTP with MTX or old school quarter eaters, it’s poison to games.
Not a mechanic i guess, but motion blur
Escort missions. Specifically when the person you are escorting is as sharp as a bag of hammers.
Microtransactions - the answer always has been and always will be microtransactions.
Truly.
For multiplayer games, I would rather subscribe to updates than have mtxs in any capacity.
Of course they never offer this though because the mtxs combined with dark patterns work better.
Pay $1 to view this comment.
Unskippable intro levels that teach the control mechanics.
Pay to win.
Permanently loosing a treasure that you can only get once because your pocket is full.
Or even worse, reading online that there’s some super special item you could have gotten 20 hours into the game if only you didn’t open that one regular chest in the starting area in the first 5 minutes of the game. I forgot which Final Fantasy did this? 9 maybe? Pissed me off to no end, i’m not playing through everything again for this… just seemed mean spirited.
More generally, when decisions early on influnce later stuff that you have no way of knowing about yet. I’m not going to play your game 50 times to see all options. So either i play with the wiki open to not miss anything, ruining the fun, or i realize later on that i could have gotten something but it’s now forever locked because of earlier decisions, pissing me off.
Baldurs Gate 3 had a lot of that…
Reload.
Lol
The last time you saved was 20 minutes ago because the game has designed spots for saving
I was more thinking of something like in zelda minish cap for example. The money pocket has a limited size, and if you collect more, you just loose it. There are also chests with money in the world that you can only open once. So you have to strategically evade chests with money, especially if the chest is easily reachable. And then there’s also those damn shells.
QTE, especially when they’re randomly inserted into an otherwise action/skill based game.
Very few checkpoints or save options. I don’t have time to try to beat something if there is like 20 mins of playtime from the last checkpoint.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay…
Case in point, unmodded Skyrim’s legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation’d…)
Or when you can’t beat the lvl1 monster easily because the scaling is so aggressive you never get to feel more powerful. Ohh look I spent 6hours on a side quest to get the legendary Sword that can cut anything from dragon scale to ghosts - yet it can’t get through thug#1’s leather shield?
The borderland series is the worst for this. Boss fights just mean you have to continuously shoot the enemy for 10-15 mins.
Skyrim and Oblivion difficulty is very stupid. If you change difficulty after playing a character for 100hr it isn’t so bad, but if you want to start out on the hardest difficulty, I’d say it’s actually impossible to play unless you have some kind of cheese tactic. Shooting a barbarian for like 1/100th of their health bar? And they one-shot you? What the hell kind of design is this?
I’m speaking from experience, I have tried… To give them some benefit of the doubt, designing a good difficulty variation is difficult (pun not intended), even games like the original Hades which has a very extensive difficulty modification system still gets flack for it
I think it would be a relatively easy problem to solve, I think being one-shot on the highest difficulty is expected, but making every enemy a damage-sponge is both anti-fun and poor game design.
Just change the scaling - damage scaling is fine as-is, health scaling needs to be drastically reduced. If a barbarian gets one-shot on the easiest difficulty, having it take like, five shots whilst also increasing the risk should be fine.
Atomfall was so good for its difficulty settings menu. They gave you soo many options. You could really tweak out a lot of parts you didn’t like in the game but make the difficulty whatever you wanted it to be.
Agreed. Everyone should take notes on how jedi: fallen order did difficulty. Sure, it did a bit of simple stat adjusting, but it also did things like increasing enemy aggression
The kill animations in Skyrim are the worst. Doesn’t matter how well you’ve done in the fight or how many potions you have, if the enemy manages to get you to a certain level of health you’re killed instantly with no way to stop it. It’s insulting to be killed like that by a random bandit that was lucky enough to drop you low enough before you could heal.
Removed by mod
For me it probably is. I do not like many of the live-service game mechanics (limited stamina, gambling, microtransactions) but at least I get why; the one I mentioned just feels lazy and would make otherwise good games feel unplayable
Yes.
Stat/EXP loss on death.
Unskippable cut scenes, especially before a boss. I want to play on hard difficulty, which means I WILL die to bosses. Do not force me to watch that shit 5+ times or I’m out like trout.
metroidvania boss walk backs are the worst kind of unskippable cutscene. Oh yeah I’d love to kill the same 3 ads and ride an elevator for 30 seconds
The Messenger does something similar but in a different way: dying summons a demon that eats any coins that the player collects for the next minute. I already suck, and now the game is punishing me by delaying upgrades.
I would just sit for a minute
When I first started Silksong and noticed my Silk upgrades were gone after death, I first thought they were gone for good. I thought a particular monster had eaten them, sort of like one of the bosses in Demon’s Souls, who can steal your character levels (or so I read, I never got to him).
Thank goodness Team Cherry at least held back here! You get them back when you find and smash the cocoon at your point of death.
And +1 for runbacks, also hair-pulling in Silksong. I never thought I’d be able to get through Bilewater.
The worst game mechanic is artificial difficulty where enemies aren’t challenging. Instead, they are just damage sponges.
Where one enemy sees you and now all their friends somehow knows where you are
