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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.
Doom3 flashlight. It’s Doom. Not fucking 5 Nights at Freddy’s.
when !flashlight@lemmy.world can give you dozens of illumination options more capable than science fiction has
Often it’s climbing.
I’m looking at you, breath of the wild.
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!
I 100%d sable and only found it mildly frustrating in certain parts. Pretty good game overall.
I wish there were more games like it where you could just enjoy the world instead of it being all about some missions.
If only it was climbing. BOTW was more like “oh there was light rain recently so fuck you, no access up here.”
Escort missions
Not a mechanic i guess, but motion blur
If that counts then in-game rendered intros on first launch running in 720p and you can’t change video/display settings until after the game finally gives you control.
I played Assassin’s Creed Origins during a free weekend a few years ago and it automatically set its own graphics settings and dumped you into the game without being able to access the menu so it looked like my screen was covered in patrolium jelly half the time. About an hour into the game when I could finally access the game menu I learned why. It set all settings to their absolute highest but resolution scaling was enabled so it was trying to render graphics my PC couldn’t handle then internally reducing the resolution down to 360p or so. Once I dialed in settings that my computer could actually handle without resolution scaling it looked a million times better
God I can’t stand it. It’s one of those things like “Why do I need that, my eyes can already do that”
To hide poor frame rate, that’s why. Motion blur was popularized on consoles by AAA studios that wanted everything to look really pretty, but couldn’t sustain a stable frame rate during rapid motion.
If you have the FPS to afford it, turn that shit off.
Since all the obvious answers have been covered, I’m gonna dig deep on a genre nobody but me even plays anymore anyway.
Character-based asymmetry in versus puzzle games. It’s never been remotely balanced, and I don’t believe it ever could be.
Suppose I put you in charge of developing a balance patch for Puyo Puyo Fever, Puzzle Bobble 3, Magical Drop, Meteos, etc, you could just name any other puzzle game that has this. What changes would you make? What changes could you even try to make?
If you look at something like a fighting game, characters have large movesets, and every move has a bunch of variables attached: startup, active, recovery, hitstun, damage, meter gain. Which means there’s a lot of surface area for developers to adjust and fine-tune until the cast hopefully feels balanced enough. Even if they don’t get it right on the first try, they can gather data from players and use that information to figure out what needs to be patched.
Puzzle games have little to no room to even try to do this. So when you try to give character choice a mechanical effect on gameplay, but they only do one thing like a dropset or garbage pattern, there are almost no meaningful buffs or nerfs that can be handed out when it turns out that Void Hole is kinda good and Skeleton T kinda isn’t.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix famously tried, and, well, an attempt was made but it ultimately couldn’t do all that much. The tiers got shuffled around slightly, but it’s still Ken Fighter.
Not really the worst, but my hot take of something I don’t like: puzzles rather than problems. By that I mean puzzles have one correct solution and everything else is wrong and doesn’t work, while with a problem you’re given some tools and an obstacle and just let loose. It’s so much more satisfying to find your own solution that it is to reach the end and realize you were being sneakily handheld through it to make sure you found the only possible way through. I’ve done a few good problems where I reach the end, then immediately reload the save from before and try some different routes just to see if it works.
Puzzles do have their place though, especially in tutorials.
I’m with you except the last sentence.
Tuts should just be direct and move out of your way.
Back onto your main point, one of the things I really like Cyberpunk for was the ability to do so many missions in so many different ways.
Like for the same mission you might just drive by as a netrunner, hack the thing, and keep driving like nothing happened. Or as a Sandevestan user you might slow down time, run past everyone, get thing and leave. Or as a … You get the point.
There are, for any given mission usually like 5 obvious ways you can think of to get it done and the game won’t slap you for it.
On the other hand, the breach protocol in the game sucks so much. They should just remove it.
By the time you’re done the game, you’ll have played that boring, unfun, tedious, not even challenging bs for collectively like an hour.
On my second play through its the first thing I modded out.
Fuck things in games that purely waste your time.
Games with inventories where they treat a single gem or a flower petal as occupying the same space in your rucksack as a pair of boots.
Guys, we go back to Ultima 7 with the key ring, the problem was solved along fucking time ago. Stop being lazy and have gem sacks, crafting bags, keyrings, etc for small items.
No natural health/mana regeneration. I hate games where you need potions to survive or are limited in your spell usage just because you do not enough mana which was finished earlier.
Time limits / countdowns.
Anything pay to play ruins it for me.
Escort missions. Specifically when the person you are escorting is as sharp as a bag of hammers.
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.
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!!!
Loot boxes
Deliberately ableist bullshit. Like no pause or an over reliance on quick time events.
Health as a resource
