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.
especially when so many games like to cram anything and everything into the open world. Yahtzee Croshaw of zero punctuation called it “jiminy cockthroat.” You have stealth, a crafting system, a skills system, collectibles, etc. Like, not every open world game needs stealth. Just because Far Cry 3 did it back in 2012 doesn’t necessitate your character to be hiding in bushes while guards walk past every other mission
Totally agree, I don’t want to have to do research before or during playing and have to consult a build guide for every level up, just so I don’t mess up my character.
Just let me fuck around, find out and do it better all over again in my own time.
I mostly play turn based JRPGs. My main gripe with any video game is excessive interacting with menus and inventories. I want to play a game, not enter submenus of submenus to change minute things. So here’s some features to combat that:
Queues: lining up research or skills to learn, so I don’t have to enter the fucking menus after every battle/minute.
Skill/Equipment sets: let me save my setups. Give me a few slots, and a warning if some part of that setup is used by another character. Heck, give me a way to save whole party setups, so I can have e.g. fire-killer team of ice-themed abilities on all characters. Or just have a standard ability set for progression and a second, temporary one for skill learning or whatnot.
Chained Echoes and FFVIIR had some good QoL improvements, but how many times do I have to shuffle materia or accessories, just because I’m leveling something? Every second encounter, because something is maxed and I have to swap it out for something else?
And Inventory management, that can make or break a game. Some of those submenus take half a minute to enter before you even do anything. Astria Ascending (I don’t recommend) was awful in that regard and guilty of everything mentioned above.
Fucking menus man… Give me some elaborate customizable skill setup slots and queues, please.
I hate games that don’t give any indication of when you’re supposed to do it. They’ll give you some tutorial on it and say “right before you’re hit” but good luck figuring out if you’re doing it too late or too early.
Hate: Tapping, quick time events, looting animations, long loading screens especially when you’re expected to die often, game taking control away from the player or excessive input latency, long NPC expositions for fetch quests.
Love: addictive gameplay loops that are borderline checklists but fun (Far Cry, Days Gone hordes, Ghost of Tsushima camps etc.), environmental impact like in Death Stranding/reactive NPCs like in Bethesda RPGs.
QTE can be done well imho, for example in Yakuza series they are rare enough to not annoy you and not THAT important but if you can hit them when they appear, it makes your hit just more powerful
Lazy UI porting between PC and console. It goes both ways - radial menus showing up in a PC game or a joystick-controlled-cursor in a console game. M+KB vs controller are not comparable input methods, so trying to manage the UI with one that was built for the other is always a massive pain in the ass.
Inventory restrictions in games that throw a LOT of shit your way. Looking at you, Bethesda. Fortunately there's usually a mod of some kind to make items weigh like 0.01 lbs, or kick your slots up to 9999 or something. Sometimes realism adds to the experience... inventory management isn't one of those times.
Sluggish controls. I want to actually enjoy the Dark Souls games SO BAD - they look beautiful, I fuckin love that dark fantasy setting... but moving and combat feel like I'm driving a school bus with boxing gloves on my hands and diving flippers on my feet. I get that the cumbersome controls are a huge part of what makes it difficult, and that the difficulty is what a lot of players are after, but personally that's not a flavor of difficulty I'll ever be able to enjoy.
Love:
Good QOL features, especially involving the topics above. Like 'Hot Deposit' certain items to all designated storages in range, or AoE loot when a bunch of foes die in a pile. The quick loot style menu from Fallout 4 is another great example. Love that stuff!
Lore. Good story writing, believable/relatable characters, ESPECIALLY the antagonists. Hitting the sweet spot there is a quick ticket to my all time favorites.
Environmental challenges, with fun ways to overcome them. When I was new to Ark, one of the biggest challenges in my first play through was getting into the super cold zones and not freezing to death. My cold weather gear didn't cut it... the solution I came up with was to tame a paracer (kind of an elephant looking dino) and build a platform on its back: and made like 6 camp fires on the platform. So the I was, trudging through an insanely cold environment on a flaming elephant, cozy as can be. As a veteran player now, there are SO much more efficient methods to solving that problem, but the experience gave a unique sense of accomplishment, which is the kind of thing that got me hooked on that game.
Escorts matching the move speed of the player. 'nuff said.
Hot take, but I actually love well implemented radial menus on PC. When games bother to reset your cursor to the centre of the circle you can just quickly flick the mouse in a certain direction to make your selection, which is faster than most other mouse menus and a lot more comfortable than trying to reach for the 9 key.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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