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.
Obligatory grinding. Like all those “retrieve my friends bracelet from the Torture Chamber of the Bloodseeking Ghouls”. You’re just running around doing the same things over and over again. Finding the place, killing everything, going back, talk to person A, get referred to person B, etc etc.
I agree that is clearly broken and overused in many games but if we were able to actually control the walking speed on PC with a keyboard similar to what is possible with a controller, it would probably be more bearable tbh.
I am a collector, and inventory management is always the thing that makes or breaks an RPG for me. Unlimited inventory is just completely unrealistic, but on the other hand, making an RPG inventory completely realistic is just no fun. Of course I want to be able to lug all that sweet loot home, including battle axes, broadswords, several full armor sets, myriad other weapons, potions, etc. Having an encumbrance such as Skyrim has makes total sense to me. I love the idea of being able to sort and filter my inventory, and store items in whatever container I own. I also like to be able to compare the stats of new items with ones I own so I know if something is a trade up.
I hate storage block inventories, where items physically take up one, or a few “squares”. I don’t want to play a tile puzzle with my items.
RDR2 has one of, if not my favorite, inventory systems. Your own 'backpack' that had a weight limit and could only carry smaller things. Big things you'd have to lug onto the back of your horse or find a cart. All of your equipped weapons are displayed on your person. If you want to swap weapons you have to run back to your horse and exchange weapons at your saddle bags
I often find mechanics that only exist to waste time incredibly annoying. In the case of loot, a limited inventory is kind of that. You could absolutely just portal/teleport to town, sell your stuff, and then get back to playing. There’s no challenge involved, EXCEPT that it wastes your real-world time.
I liked the pets in Torchlight for this reason. You could send them off to sell loot, while you kept playing the part of the game that’s actually fun.
One exception is something like Resident Evil, where the choice is relevant to the gameplay directly. But even then, I would’ve preferred limits on individual elements (Only X weapons, only X healing items, etc.) and having extras automatically stored.
Gathering mechanics in rpgs. It’s a waste of time neuron activator. I want to get immersed in the world and not walk from bush to bush going grabbing flowers, rocks and sticks.
I strongly dislike ingame teleporting and pause menu quick travel. I’d much rather the game have more ways for me to get to where I’m going than simply materializing wherever I want to be.
Let the travel itself be part of the game instead of just a way to link the “real” parts of the game together. Make it fun and fast to move around, add unlockable shortcuts, add more in-universe traveling options. Let me get to where I’m going myself instead of doing it for me, and make it fun to do so.
Especially in open world games, not only is this the most true, but they’re the worst offenders. Literally what is the point of making an open world and then letting people skip it? You see everything once and that’s it. If you make an open world full of opportunities to wander and explore, and then players want to avoid it as much as possible via teleportation, you have failed as a designer.
Time is limited. I don’t want to spend 30 minutes traveling from one side of a map to the next if I’ve already done that 15 times. Just let me get there immediately so I can talk to this single person and get this item I will never use.
I’m honestly fine with traveling if it’s interesting. That’s what I disliked most about red dead 2 was even with the beautiful landscape and soundtrack and the random encounters, pretty much every one of your 50 trips to [insert nearby settlement] within a given chapter are going to be exactly the same, and you can’t go very fast because you’re on a horse.
I’m pretty sure Death Stranding didn’t have fast travel, and I think it worked quite well there. Part of the challenge is to learn the best route between the stations, so it’s well incorporated into the gameplay. There’s barely any enemies on your way either, and those that exist are easily avoidable.
Traveling in Death Stranding is the game though. Enemies are only one part of the challenge; there's also terrain and how much cargo you can carry on the way, even if you've taken that route before.
I found Death Stranding to be a game that, even though it has combat in it, it's a solid demonstration of how many different types of mechanics we could be building a game around besides combat, even with a story and high production value.
I would go as far as to say that the combat is the weakest part of the gameplay. I did not enjoy the boss battles and had to turn down the difficulty for them.
I guess the combat was the weakest part, but it composes such a small part of the game that it made plenty of sense. From that perspective, I found it weird that it had any boss battles at all.
Games that give you rapid and fun ways to travel have been ones that I've actually not found tedious to get from point a to point b. Methods I've like have been blink (teleporting short distances), grapple hook, super speed, flying, etc.
But, just old fashioned running or driving gets stale fast.
I am really conflicted on this, and I think there needs to be some balance or cost/reward. I mostly agree though.
An example I often use about this is in MMOs. WoW felt like a huge world, especially back in vanilla. You could fly end to end and never hit a loading screen, it felt awesome. If you gave me a map of Azeroth and asked me to label all the zones, I probably could. It’s moved a bit more to people teleporting place to place, but I still can fly end to end of a continent.
On the other hand, FFXIV is a series of maps with loading zones between all of them (a necessity because of the older console architecture, I understand) and teleports in every town. You never actually go end to end of Eorzea. If you gave me a map of Eorzea and asked me to label only the three majors cities on it, I doubt I could. It is definitely convenient to just be able to warp around place to place for a trivial amount of currency.
It takes a lot out of the feeling of “world” to just have a bunch of arbitrary areas, I admit. It’s a tough balancing act between player convenience and player immersion.
Yeah, FFXIV makes is super convenient to revisit a place once you've already been there via the aetheryte, meaning you're probably not going to visit it on foot more than a few times. This means you don't really make that connection between zones (or at least, I didn't) and thus don't really view it as an interconnected world (the loading areas between each zone doesn't really help).
I'm struggling to give proper credit to WoW because I'm not sure if its the staggering amount of time I played the game, the time of my life when I played the game (younger brain retaining knowledge better?), or the seamless transition between zones which lends it to sticking in my memory so hard as a 'real, interconnected world'... probably a combination of the three, if we're being honest.
I think MMOs need fast travel because sometimes you just want to meet your friends in X dungeon and all the scenic travel is just an obstacle to that. There shouldn't be barriers to the social aspect of these games. MMOs have more than enough padding already, if people want the immersive experience they can choose to do that on their own.
Love - auto health or shield regen. When I first experienced that in Halo it made me instantly hate other games that didn’t have some form of that mechanic.
I hate managing health inventory items. It breaks gameplay flow with tedious bullshit that isn’t nearly as fun as focusing on the a combat mechanic.
Auto health makes the game oriented around taking as much cover as possible. You just pop out, shoot, and then jump back to hiding again.
The newer Doom games for example uses limited health to force you be that cool action hero who is participating in the action. Health is regained by killing enemies. If they had regen the player would just be back to hiding behind covers like cowards.
Doom was interesting because it was a solution to both of those problems at once. Doom shouldn't be a cover shooter, but hunting for health packs is not action packed or fun, so the enemies became health packs.
The Estus Flask in Dark Souls was great. You couldn’t spam a million of them on a boss fight but you also got them all back when you were safe. There wereots of things to dislike but that was a major positive. And to your point, it’s not buried in a menu either. It’s just right there.
Do huge fucking cliffs and invisible walls count as mechanics?
I know equipment durability does and that can fuck right off.
One thing I love is when the game mechanics are well grounded in the world. A recent good example of this was in Tears of the Kingdom; in one cutscene you actually see Zelda use the Purah Pad to fast-travel out of trouble just like you also can. It elevates it from a gaming conceit to something actually part of the world.
I usually dislike weapon durability (eg, in Fallout), but Zelda is the one game where I actually liked it. Perhaps because in Zelda, it was a central mechanic that the game was designed and balanced around.
For most games, durability is something that the game isn’t really designed around and feels more forced in. When you can repair your gear (as you usually can), durability just means every now and then you gotta deal with the annoyance of repairing.
The annoying part in Zelda was where you'd acquire and destroy your weapon in just a small handful of swings, like the kingdom of Hyrule had the world's worst blacksmiths.
The new Zelda games are what solidified my hatred of durability. Oh look I finished this quest line and got a fancy sword that's a reference to an older game! Time to put it on a shelf and never use it so it doesn't explode and go away forever.
The one thing they could've done that would have made the whole thing tolerable was if the special weapons from your allies were unlimited. The Eagle Bow, the Boulder Smasher, etc. At least then you would always have one thing in whichever style you liked that you could just use without always worrying about. Instead those are the most expensive hardest to get weapons and they still have fucking durability. It just makes everything worse and every reward less rewarding.
I agree with you on those special weapons. I dunno why the heck they made those so rare or expensive while also not being that durable. I don’t find it an issue for most normal weapons, though, especially with the fuse mechanic in TotK. I like how it forces me to vary things up and allows for regular treasure chests or drops to actually give you something you can use (even if it’s basically like a short lasting consumable).
Forced sections in AAA games. If you wander left or wander right or jump or sneak a direction it didn't want you get a mysterious death. Just make it a cutscene if you are going to pidgeonhole me so much assasins creed, or a cartoon movie.
Love: weapon durability so long as it’s paired with weapon building and leveling systems. I like that I can’t ever take a weapon for granted and that I can’t hack and slash without thinking. I have Dark Cloud in mind as I’m writing this - it was easily my favorite weapons system I’ve ever played, and it always kept me on my toes. It’s a kind of stress I appreciate because I have some measure of control over it as long as I plan and slow down a little.
Hate: timed anything. Way too much pressure, and it pushes me back towards going faster and not thinking so I can beat the timer, which I don’t like. I especially hate it because I primarily play turn-based JRPGs to get away from having to worry about timing and to be able to play at my own pace. If I wanted to do time-sensitive stuff, I’d play an action game.
This is really a “it takes all kinds” moment for me. I can’t think of a mechanic I dislike more than weapon durability. It makes me feel like I have to “save” my good weapon and only use it for boss fights or something.
In a way, it’s cool to hear how and why someone loves it, even if I don’t relate.
Combos. I don’t like them when they’re intentional by the developer, they need to be something that you feel like you’ve discovered on your own. I hear Baba is You is pretty good about that.
I recently observed a game of MtG where a newish player was playing a scry deck, some premade or something, had a guy who would scry every time a creature dropped, and a guy who would place counters every time he scried. He’d edited the deck slightly, added a creature that spawned tokens every time it received counters. Managed to get them all out at once before realising what he’d done; straight up had to ask if tokens count as creatures dropping because he wasn’t sure if infinite combos were real. That’s a good feeling, because it’s something he did, not something that was given to him.
Contrast League or Overwatch or whatever where the devs have specific ideas about how characters should work and will aggressively destroy things outside of that. Or just modern Magic.
Diablo 3 was fucking terrible about this. anytime a good combo was discovered they would nerf it. it's a single player game, just let me have my overpowered bullshit.
Have you ever tried Skullgirls? You can form a team of up to three characters, and you can select just about any move they have as an assist, forming some wild synergies.
Having well placed saved points and QOL features is absolutely amazing. I'm not interested in spending 10-15m running back / repeating myself just because the save progression system is rubbish. A lot more developers are more respectful of your time in that regard so it's a great improvement
I feel save points themselves are becoming an increasingly archaic design choice. Just let us save anywhere, especially in a single player game. I think most people are just suspending games without expressly saving most of the time.
Having a character of one main class and a secondary class that could be switched at any time between any of the 9 classes.
8-slot skillbar with one heroic skill that could only come from your main class.
400+ total skills in the game.
Plenty of room for you to make your own homebrew builds, and some classic builds that were outside the box:
The assassin that used a staff (assacaster), the ranger that used necro skills to touch people to death (touch ranger), and the 55 monk, which had almost no hp but so much healing it was hard to kill.
It will always be my MMORPG because of the character design.
If "Secret World Legends" isn't already on your radar, it might be up your alley.
Haven't played GW1, but SWL has a moveset similar to what you described.
It's set in modern day, with the premise that all myths, conspiracy theories, urban legends etc are all true - and frequently need to be contained. There are three factions: STRONGLY recommend you choose Illuminati (best faction story line by a long shot).
The investigative missions will make you feel like a moron, but in a weirdly good way. SUPER satisfying to figure them out without looking up hints online.
Not a game I hear mentioned much, but man Secret World had so many great things going for it. The best quest design in a MMO* I have ever seen, and a really unique setting too. Shame it was managed so badly, in an alternate world where TSW took off and was still getting content updates, I would be thrilled.
Hate: disproportionately excessive penalties for falls (usually found in platformers).
If you get shot in the face by an enemy, you lose your shield, lose a life, whatever. In a bad platformer, if you don’t time a difficult jump exactly right, you lose a life, lose everything in your inventory, get sent back to the very beginning of the level, get audited, and have to mow the developers lawn for an entire summer.
Platformers are “guilty until proven innocent” - I won’t play one until I know it won’t destroy my will to live.
For platformers, maybe. But for certain genres – like battle royale – the risk of losing it all after one mistake is part of the thrill. It all depends on the game.
I honestly can’t even remember the one that first set me off. It’s been a while. I just remember realizing that gravity was more punishing than any of the enemies, and thinking “oh, to hell with this.”
Starting with what I dislike: collectibles (or pickup upgrades). They spread these out over the levels and I find myself scouring the map to see if i didn’t miss anything. It ruins the pacing of the game. Some examples of my recent plays that do this are the Last of Us games and the Mass Effect trilogy. If the game is build around exploring your surroundings, it’s a different story of course.
What I really like in games is character building and i love it when a character improves depending on your playstyle. A very solid example is Skyrim’s leveling system. It just feels more organic.
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