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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Base building. Fortifying against enemies and being creative is a blast.
Exploration and big worlds. Games like Borderlands, Fallout and Far Cry with unique environments and ambiance.
Hate:
Escort missions. After all these years they’re still not fun.
Excessive health bars. Having to carry several different kinds of potions, etc. One of my favorite games is Dark Cloud for the PS2, but I think it had health, mana, weapon health, thirst and effects like poison that never cleared until you took a certain potion. I believe I used a GameShark or similar to get rid of thirst and weapon health.
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.
Love: When mystery games actively draw attention to the idea that you need to draw your own conclusions about what you find in the game, and make your own truth, instead of just following a track
Hate: when the above is expressed as a formalized “Mind Palace” mechanic à la the more recent Sherlock Holmes games. That’s just covering the track with a tarp instead of letting you build your own theories. Either let people accuse who they want with the evidence they have (once again I plug Paradise Killer) or acknowledge that there’s only one acceptable answer
I’ve played a little. It’s okay. The one I was playing didn’t do anything approximating the Mind Palace and was very, very linear-- which I think is better than the Sherlock Holmes style games. It was the everything else about it that annoyed me into turning it off!
I hate when games are open world just cause. I only ever enjoy an open world when there’s an insane amount of lore like in Skyrim or Fallout, but in most games I prefer a linear gameplay or semi-open (Mass effect, Dragon Age)
At some point something happened and literally every game has to be open world now 😭
And that Halo game I can’t remember what it’s called, but there’s an open world Halo game and it’s awful.
The biggest problem in that game, and in general, is the fact that, yeah it’s an open world game, but there isn’t really a lot to do, so you have to run around through the level, which is usually boring, to get to the actual next bit of the game.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they just teleported you to the next bit. Then the open world aspect could be played around with on your terms, but you could also just ignore it if you wanted. But they never do that because they’ve made an open world, and they want you to look at it.
While I don’t mind openworld games, they definitely feel off, esp. with regards to the main quest. Can’t save the world, gotta get this granny laid.
One of the only games with a open world that actually REQUIRED it for the game to make sense is Paradise Killers. It’s a detective open world game on an island. The open world makes a lot of sense, because a detective has to find their clues. It’s not a detective game if there’s a counter of “clues found” or there’s a linear progression. The game never tells you that you’re done finding clues. Like a real detective in a real open world, you have to decide whether you’ve seen enough.
I mostly dislike open-world games because of the lazy travel systems. Either you have to run everywhere or you free fast-travel from any point, too any point.
There is no middelground.
I miss games like Morrowind, where you not only had to pay for fast-travel, but it functioned more like an actual transportation system. Like, you had to go to this city and take a Strider to that town and then a boat ride to get to your destination.
Giving the world some infrastructur and natural money drainers helps with immersion and facilitates the need to go do some side-quests every now then. You get fast-travel, but you also get to see the world that was build for you. And you don’t run around as the richest douche in the world by level 10 with the best gear available because nothing costs anything.
Bethesda skipped this aspect entirely back in Oblivion and never looked back. Making your characters golden gods from the get-go, with no reason to interact with anyone or do anything except screwing around and collecting trinkets.
There’s more to it, ofcause, but this is the biggest pet-peeve I have.
A Plague Tale is an incredible example of what can be done with a linear design. Both Innocence and Requiem were amazing.
Open world games like the Witcher 3 leave the player with this really weird interaction with plot urgency. I’m looking for someone but just barely missed them? Hurry to the next town so I don’t miss them again? But then zero consequences when I ignore that quest for twenty levels.
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).
The junction system in Final Fantasy VIII. The magic system is based on the amount of spells you have left in an inventory and you can also equip them to your character’s stats. If you don’t take the time to acquaint yourself with the system your stats will take a dive because you’re casting spells like in a more traditional game. The upside to this is if you hoard enough spells and equip them to the right stats you can be unstoppable since early game.
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