Ask Lemmy

Fragile world-spanning deliveries.

Silksong has me screaming over them, 10 - 20 minutes of walking and one too many smacks at the end ruins it. And then there's the one that's also timed!

But to be fair, most of Silksong gets me yelling at the TV on the regular! I love it and hate it!

Hold w to crawl forward

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."

Roll and move. Skip your turn.

Both Control and the dogshit Avengers game had these upgrade systems where you were constantly bombarded with pickups that offered inane benefits like “2.5% increase to headshot damage for 3 seconds after taking damage while in midair” and you spent half the game managing your goddamn upgrades and the limited upgrade slots instead of having fun. It got to the point where I was relieved when I DIDN’T get any upgrades after a battle.

I don't think that I can give the worst, but I can give some that I did not enjoy.

• Invisible teleporters. Some old RPGs

like the D&D Gold Box games

came without an auto-mapping feature. Part of the game was, as one played along, manually creating a map on graph paper. This in-and-of-itself was somewhat time-consuming, and if one made a mistake or got turned around, it could be hard to fix one's map. A particularly obnoxious feature to complicate this was that sometimes, there'd be unmarked teleporters to move you to another place on the map without notice, and you had to figure out that this had happened. Very annoying. I didn't like this mechanic.

• Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature. Some strategy games do this. The idea here is to force you to think in real time, and not permit you to just pause and think about things. Problem is, even if one agrees with this, in the real world, sometimes you need to answer the door or use the toilet. Not a good idea.

• In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one's precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There's some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don't think that it's necessary

a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don't really like situations where it's just added for the sake of being there.

The outright scams and marketting dark patterns.

Outside of this, I hate when you have levelled up a character immensely to the point where an errant sneeze could wipe out half a city, and then you flick a boss to defeat their lineage then lose in the cutscene.

I know the reasons why this is done, but I would vastly prefer shorter but more fleshed out game experiences.

A shorter story that is actually repayable naturally where you can do so many things and there are not cutscene losses.

Speaking of which, things like

I don't want to have to read some guide to know that a a piece of content I really value will exist.

Its not fun to me to have notable portions of a game cut out such that you have to be a wiki reader.

These combined would make a game with a more stress free experience where you can truly just experience the world and not be too fussed about if you stuffed up a certain ending tree etc.

You know when you are in the middle of a game's story and then you get caught or something wjd the enemy takes all your gear and you have to find your gear or fight to get it back? No screw that. So annoying.

And I'm the kind of player that does all sise quests before doing the main story so I can be OP and plow through the story. Just let me do that and don't take what I worked hard to get.

Escort Missions. Especially when pathfinding AI was terrible.

Quick Time Events in a game that it isn't the focus. Halo 4 had exactly two quick time events. One in the first level and one in the last level.

Anything that is 100% chance and just wasting time, with no meaningful way for the player to influence the odds. For example, how fishing is implemented in some MMOs like ESO: you can eat a buff food and use the correct bait for the water, but beyond that you're just waiting in agony until the random timer dings. Then you do that 12 times before moving to the next hole, etc. "Waiting" isn't an enjoyable mechanic.

Stealth challenges on games that don't have stealth as a regular mechanic

Anything that makes you follow an npc that doesn't match speed with the fucking player

Fishing

All the ones gacha games employ: daily stamina, grind to get some currency, power creep the characters, create content that can only be cleared with premium characters etc.

Sports games pretty much stopped progressing entirely when the "ultimate team" cancer spread.

Grinding and no rewards. Feeling underpowered and dying all the time, unable to progress with loot alone.

Looking at you, Path of Exile.

Button-mashing events. (The Rapid-fire kind)

QTE, including those i have to align those bar that goes left and right, or those tap a button quickly, in any game that isn't point and click adventure game. It's not fun in God of War, and it's not fun in Dying Light.

Also extreme hand-holding tutorial that force you to click button or do certain action else your progression is refused. This happened a lot in mobile game, which i basically refuse to play.

Not really a game mechanic, but as an achievement hunter I freakin' HATE speedrun-achievements. The longer the game, the worse it is

Escort missions

Anything pay to play ruins it for me.

I've got a time-traveling kick in the nuts prepared for whoever invented wall-humping for unmarked secrets. I first remember this from Wolfenstein 3D but I'm not sure if it existed before then.

Unchangeable difficulty settings. Worse, games that offer you to lower it and don't warn you that they're going to lock it at the lower setting. Resident Evil Village did that to me. Last time I posted about this someone said it warms you, so I guess they changed it.