I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
I hate when games try to make you feel like you have player agency when it’s really just a cutscene and you’re pressing a button. Whether it’s a QTE or “Press F to Pay Respects.” Recently RDR2 was a huge offender of this, featuring probably half a dozen cutscenes where all you do is press W or up on the controller to walk forward or whatever you’re doing. Like there’s one where it’s probably 5 minutes of walking forward interspersed with dialogue. I understand why the developers made you walk that far. It adds to the tension and it adds to the feeling of despair that the character is currently going through. But I think it would’ve been fine if it was just a regular cutscene instead of “Press W to walk” and if you let go you stop walking, meaning you can’t even take a break.
edit: also I dislike stealth games with unrealistic “alert” systems. In a good example like Metal gear solid v, you get a solid 5 to 10 seconds if a guard is outside hearing / sight range of other guards, so even if you’re spotted you’re still fine as long as you take them out quickly and silently. And even if you dont take him out quickly, he’ll still only be able to alert people nearby or he needs to take some time to alert on the radio. On the other hand, in cyberpunk 2077 if just one guard saw you for even a fraction of a second, the entire base would be alerted. I guess lore-wise it makes sense, but from a gameplay perspective it was the least fun I had in that game. Trying to stealth my way through an entire place only for the whole thing to come crashing down because somebody saw my shoulder from 15 meters away. It came to a point where I was just going in guns blazing because stealth just wasn’t worth it.
Spider-man from 2018 was also like this. The enemy hideouts or whatever were based very heavily around the game’s stealth mechanics, but if just 1 guard became alerted, everybody would become alerted and it would start its stupid wave system. The game heavily encouraged you to take out guards silently so it didn’t send in wave after wave of them, but it was just so incredibly punishing to be silent in that game.
Yeah it makes me feel like a dumbass.
I recently bought marvels midnight suns because it was on sale, i didn't even onow it was a card game. I usually don't really play card games. The game is fine, actually i kinda like it. But the things i don't like are the things when you don't play the card game. You just awkwardly walk around in 3rd person. After every fight it's the same. You walk to a guy, go to bed, skip 3 cutscenes, walk to the forge, walk to the upgrade thing, walk to whoever you have to talk. Probably 1/3 of the game is walking the same path every ingame day.
Make an option to skip all of that. Make it a drop down menu or something.
I love simple controls or an elegant way to control simply. For example using one thumb to control two buttons simultaneously or the Super Mario Run control scheme where you only press on the touch screen, doesn’t matter where, and that’s it.
I hate it when in co-op game the other player’s actions can screw up the game e.g. moving the screen too far so the other player dies.
I hate anything that stops me from playing the game. Stun mechanics, usually, but I also include quick time events.
The one that sticks in my mind was those dumb water mages in genshin impact. They trap you in a bubble and hold you there for a few seconds. If it’s an intense enough fight, a few seconds is an incredibly long time, and you’re just sitting there watching the game happen and you’ve lost your agency. It’s worse for me because I had built shields and healing into my team to shore up my shortcomings with dodging. It felt clever, but them the game sends in this mechanic which invalidates my solution.
With quick time events, I just get annoyed at the genre switch. Don’t get me wrong, there are cool enough cinematics out there… It’s just… Like usually I’m watching these and thinking, “wow, that would’ve been fun to do, you know, myself.”
Nevermind that I’m too ADHD. Like I have cats and a partner and a phone. If I get a buzz or whatever else, I might miss the prompt. Or if I ignore the buzz, whatever that might have been can sometimes get discarded in my brain.
I love team building. The interplay of abilities, the hard choices with limited slots and opportunity cost. Finding unintentional synergies, or even stumbling on them. Its all a dream, and it’s part of why I love ttrpgs so much.
I can sometimes get so bogged down (positive) with team building I never make it amywhere in the game itself.
Also love me a good physics engine. God knows how many hours I spent building stupid shit in Garry’s Mod. I learned to code before I played that game, so it was delightful to put those skills to use with wiremod as a little kid. LoZ: ToTK I have like 1000 hrs logged just fucking around in the builder spot at the base of Tarry Town.
Does this include cloud streamed games? I for one am still waiting for a streaming exclusive game in the vein of Elden Ring or BotW. Bonus if it’s an MMO. Imagine how much more mysterious a world could be if no one is able to datamine the binary. The only way to discover things would be players actually discovering them.
Eh. I would say that they are still mysterious and interesting if you don’t look at the information on a website saying what’s in the game or not. So yeah, I don’t really like what cloud gaming is doing. If you want to keep the mystery of a universe, have some self-control.
I’m not saying “for each player, they are able to experience a sense of wonder in a game when played in isolation”, that’s old hat. I’m saying “for all players, everyone experiences a shared sense of wonder and discovery in an artificial world they live in together”.
I’ve never played Elden Ring, yet I couldn’t help but see the community make new discoveries together. The first couple of days every post was about Margit, then a few people found the fake wall that hides an entire zone, and a month later someone has reverse engineered the levels and found a wall that takes over 1000 hits to get rid of.
When the binary is entirely hidden from the users, and the only thing the users have have access to is a window peering into the world as you want them to see it, you get to create an entire set of physical laws that is hidden from the players. Players have to work together to conduct experiments, peer review each other, compete with each other, and become experts in very narrow fields of research within your simulation. Imagine spending months as a community raising in-game funding and developing the technology to sail/fly/launch to a New World for the first time, and when you finally arrive you know you are the first set of players to ever see it, specifically as a result of your efforts.
What you’re describing is a neat little one-off escape room experience. What I’m describing is an actual world. We currently cannot do this.
While this is a cool concept, I don’t think there is a single organization with the money needed to pull it off that wouldn’t also ruin the concept with monetization features. Maybe some kind of community made game could accomplish it, similar to what the Thrive devs are doing, but the amount of consistent resources needed would be a lot.
Yeah, that’s why I think we’re in an MMO slump right now. The only companies who can afford the scale “need” it to be a cash cow. So they need really predictable methods of generating income, which means not doing anything too interesting. I’m hoping one day we’ll get past that. I think we have the technology right now for indie devs to roll out a semi-affordable MMO of decent quality, but I also don’t want the market to be flooded with garbage MMOs. We already have too many of those.
Social and conversational engines (think Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing) tend to make me feel a lot lonelier than straight NPC dialogue. I think it’s because NPCs are shallow enough that I don’t see them as people, just people-shaped quest dispensers, but when you add social systems on top they’re inevitably going to fall short and that friend-shape turns into an NPC and my brain realizes I was playing alone the whole time. I’m really looking forward to the integration of language models into games so I can actually socialize with these characters, even when they’re more shallow than real people.
I think it’s fun to work down a questline for an NPC, but I agree that attempts to make it more that a simple branching dialogue tend to fall a bit flat. I also tend not to like the gift giving grind a lot of games do. I much prefer to go do things with an NPC and often that forms a better bond than an NPC with more dynamic dialogue.
I hate the overwhelming number of currencies and crafting supplies. I shouldn’t need to have to gather so much of this thing and so much of this other thing (neither of which are labeled clearly, what they are and how to find them) to craft things. A small number of things makes sense, e.g. metal and powder to make ammunition, but when this potion requires 5 different plants and that potion needs 7, only some of which are common between them, it’s an unnecessary time suck.
Then, when I have an abundance of various supplies, I have to go to the blacksmith to repair my armor, run over to the jeweler to craft bigger gems, then go to the chest to stash things, go over here for various upgrades, and over there to craft the next potion I need. Why can’t all these things be in one place or at least right next to each other instead of scattered all over town?
And to add on to that, let crafting access your stash with everything in it. Don’t make me carry 10k iron to the blacksmith to craft the sword then 20 gems to the magician to enchant it or some nonsense, especially when there are inventory limits. I have it, it’s in my storage, let me use it.
Destiny did this. I have no idea why people love that game, btw. The guns and the environment are well designed, and the story (if you call it that) teases of science fiction. But that’s all the positives about it.
The secrets are so bad that you need to follow a Youtube guide and would probably never discover them in a lifetime. The raids are a huge chore of completely arbitrary series of mechanics that are never explained. You grind for weapons and they get nerfed. You keep doing the same missions again and again and again. Your trophies that you firmed for in year can just go away without notice. The damned thing does not even run on Linux. The list of ways it is unfun goes on.
I’ve never gotten over how annoying the food / injury system in Metal Gear Solid 3 was. I almost didn’t play it because 30 minutes in it pissed me off so much.
I’m absolutely baffled as to why more than one game I’ve ever played had fishing in it.
I love the X series (despite the unfortunate name), but the literal real-time days you spend waiting for money to appear in your account are still more engaging than any fishing minigame ever.
I don’t mind the fishing mini game in Breath of Fire 3. You can see all the fish and it’s just a matter of skill not patience. That said, it’s optional (the only fish you need, I believe you can buy) and trying to 100% it is a chore I’d rather not do again.
I agree with fishing mini games, it’s almost never anything like actual fishing, but some sort of weird experience that requires a combination of precise timing, button mashing or both.
That being said I think it’s insane to me that Nintendo crammed a fishing mini game in basically every Zelda game except for BotW and TotK, the two games where it would actually make sense. I just wanna chill and throw out a line. It’s every other zelda game where I just did the minimum amount required to get a bottle or whatever I needed.
One of my favorites that I fell in love with was a particular class on an MMO game called Rift. It was the chloromancer. In practice it was tricky and arguable how effective it is but it was a healer class that provided raid/group heals by doing damage. Your damage attacks would provide the heals.
Just a neat concept I immediately fell in love with.
Weapon durability becomes a lot more bearable when you streamline the decision-making process to “do I want this stick” and “which stick do I want the least to make room for this new stick” and/or treat it as an exercise in zen. Leave your burdens at the shore of the dao, dear Bandicoot.
I think it worked really well for TotK. Unlike with BotW, I was actually kinda excited when my weapons broke because by that time, I had some new, better monster part I wanted to fuse to make a new, better weapon. It made it more fun having the weapons break so that I would be more likely to try new combinations.
It’s the primary reason I put down Breath of the Wild. Hit an enemy three times with a basic weapon and it breaks? Nah, I’m good.
I think if I had any sort of fandom towards Legend of Zelda as a series, I may have stuck with it, but that’s just not a series I could get into when it was coming up (Link To The Past, Ocarina, etc.)
Weapon durability in, say, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is handled way better. Gun starts to slowly become inaccurate and more unreliable (more frequent jamming, which means you have to reload mid-firefight to clear the jam. I actually like that).
Hey! The first half was actually really good. The second half didn’t happen.
Seriously, I remember replaying Fahrenheit like 2 or 3 times and always stopping at the halfway mark. That very first level in the diner promised soooo much, and the game never delivered.
The early God of War games were so unbelievably brutal for these. On harder difficulties, I would often master a boss only to have to retry it again a few more times because the quick time events to actually finish them off would be kicking my ass.
Un-skippable cutscenes or tutorials. This really hampers replayability of missions/quests, or even entire games in general.
Artificially limited customization in order to sell more via micro-transactions.
Time-gated features. I hate it when games require a certain amount of in-game time before some things are unlocked.
Pay-to-win in multiplayer games. Preventing or limiting progression with ability to bypass it with a purchase is just gross. If you want to go F2P, do it all the way. I’m fine with for-purchase cosmetics, but getting a leg up on fellow players if you can afford it is just bad.
Love:
Don’t have anything specific. Anything that sucks me into the game.
I hate not being able to pause a game, particularly a single player game. I think Elite Dangerous solidified my hatred of this, by not telling you the game is still running when you’re on the “pause” menu.
“B-B-BU-BUT it’s a simulation and you can’t pause real life so it makes it more real”
It’s a game, even if it’s a simulation game. It’s a toy for grown-ups. A very nice and fun and relaxing toy, but a toy nonetheless. It’s not more important than a phone call, call at the door, crying child, hungry cat, partner who needs a hand with something etc.
This probably extends to being able to save anywhere and rejoin later, but I think that one is covered pretty well by everyone else :)
The problem with Elite Dangerous is that it is basically an online game, even in solo play and they never bothered to figure out a way for solo players to pause.
Elite dangerous is a multiplayer game. If you want to go do something else and don’t have time to put your spaceship somewhere safe, you can always exit to the main menu. It only takes a few seconds and when you come back your ship is exactly where you left it.
The game definitely has issues, but not being able to pause isn’t really one of them
I never really bothered with the multiplayer mode in it - I know the game was built with a multiplayer back end, but they did promise a single player mode, and they do present the game as having a single player/solo mode.
Obviously different things annoy different people, and I do get what you mean about quitting and restarting etc, but it was enough for me to stop bothering to play it and play X4:Foundations instead. I did still get over a hundred hours play out of it, so I don’t exactly feel hard done by, but if quitting to the main menu works, then it’s clearly mechanically possible for them to let you pause it, they just didn’t want to.
I really dislike being set back far when I die or mess up. I can handle a fair bit of repetition, but replaying the exact same thing over and over because I died is frustrating and boring.
Which means that I particularly dislike when games have lousy checkpointing or save systems. I also dislike when games are too difficult and I can’t turn the difficulty down to at least get past whatever is giving me a hard time. And of course, unskippable cut scenes right after a checkpoint are a classic pain in the ass.
Examples:
I just finished Outer Wilds and found that game’s checkpointing to be pretty frustrating. So many boring trips to Brittle Hollow because I lost my footing. I almost gave up because it was so bad.
I never finished GTA 4. I got stuck in some mission where there was like a 5 minute drive and then some difficult combat. I kept dying and having to redo the very boring drive over and over killed my motivation. I don’t even know why it was so hard. I played GTA 5 twice with no issues.
I tried Dark Souls once. Lol, lasted maybe an hour before giving up. Now I’m very wary of any game that doesn’t have configurable difficulty levels. Thankfully, most games these days are actually progressing to more granular or meaningful difficulty levels.
The worst thing is that it’s often just that one specific mission that has shitty checkpoints. The rest is generally fine, but then you hit that wall and you want to do PHYSICAL VIOLENCE. At least that’s been my experience.
GTA 4 is definitely such a big motivation-killer because of these issues. Apparently it used to have no checkpoints, but then when the PC port was released they added just one checkpoint per mission apart from the bank robbery which has a whopping two checkpoints. And in typical rockstar fashion like 99% of the missions start with really long walking or driving sequences, so I agree that it got really tedious on the harder missions.
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