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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
Yeah you can make stone, iron, and hardwood fences too. Only real difference is that they last longer respectively, but you still need to eventually replace them. Which is still kinda tedious.
I would totally be up for requiring more resources to craft a tool to not have it degrade ever.
That’s a great idea.
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.
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.
Fuck, this annoys me so much. The new-ish sony games are awful with it (Spider-man and GoW at least), providing beautiful, intricate worlds and levels to explore, but if you aren’t sprinting toward the next objective at every moment, it constantly bombards you with little nagging voicelines from npcs or even the main character themselves. I hate it.
Act 1 BG3 was pretty bad about this. I thought the tadpole plot was going to be resolved in Act 1!
It’s very important that we find a healer or we’re going to die! But also, you can only get one camp interaction per rest so take your time~
THAT’S NOT GOING TO WORK!
TRY SOMETHING ELSE!
USE THE TADPOLE!
First game that came to mind was RD2. I remember a mission at the beginning, where you’re meant to clear out some Plinkertons from a house, and I remember one of the camp NPCs asking you to look around for supplies (or maybe something specific).
As soon as you’re able to leave the area, Dutch starts screaming at you to hurry tf up. A friend and I will occasionally quote him when we’re being jokingly impatient with one another: “C’MON ARTHUR, QUIT HORSIN’ AROUN’! WE AIN’T GAHT ALL DAAAY!”
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.
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.
Absofuckinglutely.
I also hate that gamers in general have been so cooked in mtxs they don’t even realize that pay to skip grind is still ptw because you get more options than other players.
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.
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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.
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.
And then you stumble into an hour long cinematic.
Fuck that, Kojima should have made movies instead of games.Don’t play Hades then
Haha, I was tempted to mention it’s different if it’s rouge like.
Ironically, hades is one of my favourite games of all time.
Also, it saves at the end of each encounter, making it very easy to stop after a few mins.
You can save in like any room if you need to quit and come back
Pay to win.
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.
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
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.
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.
Probably encumberance, almost certainly the single most ignored rule in rpgs.
But honorable mention goes to old school AC/THAC0 - the mechanics were originally for modern-era battleship game where armor class referred to size. Using the smallness of boats to model the defensive power of better armor was never going to produce sensible results. THAC0 was always unweildy at the table, slowed play, and turned combat into a chorus of “uggghhhh does a 13 hit?” “Ugh… no.”
Encumbrance makes a lot of sense in the context of old D&D, progression was tied to how much treasure you could get out of a dungeon. It also works well in survival-type games where resource management is a key mechanic. But like many facets of old D&D it is applied widely with no consideration.
I also think that like a lot of old d&d, it just wasn’t very good.
Having an encumbrance system isn’t necessarily bad - there are plenty of design goals it can support, as you point out. But counting out every pound and ounce has always been more work than most players want to do.
so many dm’s would give bags of holding and such early on so that it became just keep track of what you get and sell what you don’t.
At least THAC0 was fun to say!
Oh yeah that’s true, it is somehow unreasonably fun to say.
We just called it TACO
Instead of having a high or low THAC0, do you say you have a soft or hard taco?
2E is still best. Fight me.
Permanently loosing a treasure that you can only get once because your pocket is full.
Reload.
Lol
Unskippable intro levels that teach the control mechanics.
Bonus if you also can’t access settings and it’s stuck in a stupid resolution or something.
Make sure the volume could win you a court case for blowing your fucking ears out and I’m there
My favorite is Killing Floor 2 which doesn’t look at your volume setting in the config file until AFTER the intro videos and the menu has loaded.
This is way common. Biggest offender recently was gears of war remake #2 with the loudest chainsaw noise you could imagine in the opening credits/developer logo
Truly. I won’t even think about starting a game without looking at the options menu.
Ancient history now but Black&White 1. “Now you know how to rotate the camera to the left. Next let’s see if you can rotate it to the right!”
In the game’s defence it was still early in the 3D era and there probably was a number of players who had never navigated a free camera in that environment before. Still rage inducing though.
Unless they’re really well integrated. The first 40-60% of Portal is a tutorial. You just don’t notice because it’s just the game.
I love how for a chunk of Portal 2 you’re playing through the exact same chambers from Portal 1
Timer that can be skipped with paid currency.
I too was about to day Dungeon Keeper for mobile. What a wasted game.
KeeperFX is on gog. Grab that instead
You can just say “mobile”.
QTE, especially when they’re randomly inserted into an otherwise action/skill based game.
Or to force you to pay attention during what is essentially a cutscene
“Ah a cutscene, time to drink some wa FUCK” It’s gotten to the point where in games which pull this stuff I wait until the cutscene is over, then pause, then drink. And in games which don’t, I’m usually a bit anxious anyways, just in case they suddenly start pulling out the QTEs.
I discovered recently that a lot of games allow you to disable qte. It usually buried in the accessibility options
Dying Light, I’m looking at you…
Where one enemy sees you and now all their friends somehow knows where you are
I love how the one game where this would make sense, FEAR (where the enemy is a clone army controlled by a single psychic commander), is also famous for how well the AI communicates with each other. They shout out detailed tactical chatter and announce their current moves even though it’s pointless due to them all sharing the same mind.
And if they have some kind of shared vision because of technology or telepathy, then make it hurt them them when one goes down.
Or make it make sense, like they have to spend a turn to contact the others, or they shout to alert other NPCs, but that just means there know there’s a threat in this general area, not “we now have magic GPS for the next five minutes, and then I guess it must have been the wind.”
Are there any good examples of AI in games that do the opposite of this? Off the top of my head, pretty much every game works like this, I imagine having every NPC having its own vision & memory would become very complex to manage.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is like this. Usually if someone spots you wanting to attack you, they’ll yell or something similar to get others attention. But other times you’ll have someone notice you, they’ll walk over and alert their buddies first and then they all come after you
One of the Splinter Cells showed you a ghost of the last position you were seen. Enemies acted as if you were last seen there.
I could understand it if the enemies communicate somehow, like relaying your location
