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.
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FUCK. THE. ALWAYS. ONLINE. PARADIGM.
Not truly a game mechanic but I love the passion against GAAS.
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.
Any sort of not respecting the player’s time: grind, making the player do the computer’s job (e.g., not having an auto-sort button for the inventory), time sinks, unskippable cutscenes, slow walking etc.
One of the things I hate the most is when people say, “You gotta be X hours in and then it is really great!” If you have to wait for a game to get good then, in my opinion, it is not a very good game. I want to have fun right from the beginning.
I suppose some games could be an acquired taste, but usually the need to invest time before you can have any fun is just bad game design.
E.g. every single MMO
Time sinks in MMOs at least give you something to show off to other players. Doing this stuff in single player is the worst.
Dude same with shows. I’m sorry but if I have to watch a whole season before it gets good I’m not watching. I respect my time, they should too.
Josh Strife Hayes on YouTube brings this up all the time. If all your good content is at the end of the game, you’re doing it wrong. How can you expect new players to actually want to play your game if they have to play most of the way through to have fun?
Oh unskippable cutscenes really are my pet peeve!
And when you die the respawn point is just before the cutscene.
There’s a special level of hell for people that do that!
Oh, didn’t notice that the title says love or hate.
So I hate time sinks, but I love roguelikes/roguelites that have well done metaprogression and also allow you to have fun with ridiculous overpowered builds.
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 :)
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 hate quick time events.
Fahrenheit flashbacks… :(
What I nightmare of a game that was
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.
I agree. The game starts off really good. Too bad they made it like this.
I will take your example and just pretend the second part didn’t happen.
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.
Ah a cutscene. Let me put my controller down, grab my drink an-
“PUSH ‘A’, MOTHERFUCKER! DO IT NOW! DO IT! Aww, you fucked it up. Way to go idiot! Why did you think you could relax for even a moment?”
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 😭
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.
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.
Agreed. Like the original linear Mirror’s Edge is way better than it’s open world prequel. It’s my go-to example for exactly this problem.
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.
Ubisoft is the worst offender!
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.
“your choices matter”
Love the concept, but most of the time, they do not matter.
I absolutely hate that concept, as even when, or especially if, it matters, it’s in the most cookie-cutter binary in-your-face kind of way, literally “(a) eat baby (b) safe baby”.
I don’t mind choice in games, but it should be actual choice, i.e. you do things because you want to do them, not because you think they will make the story go to the “good ending” or worse yet, be forced on you to stay on the good path, as the game is only build for good and bad path and everything in the middle is just mechanically broken.
The best choices in games are fully mechanics driven or just cosmetic, though that’s pretty damn rare in narrative games. In most games choice is generally just bad and annoying, as you aren’t focused on the actual game or story, but on what the writer might consider to be the “good way”.
That good old fragile “suspension of disbelief” gets shattered by choice systems very very easily.
That’s why games like dwarf fortress, project zomboid, are more about taking proper decisions
I think the best I’ve seen it done is in Prey 2017. Lots of really good mechanics driven choices that are actually choices.
Cough cough Mass Effect cough cough Cyberpunk 2077 cough cough
I personally find the most important part of those choices isn’t the actual effect, but whether the game managed to immerse me enough so that I care.
For example, in Life is Strange, there’s a string of choices you can make that will get someone killed (or save them). The game invests enough time in the character before hand so when you come to the crossroads, the decisions FEEL very important. Do those choices have any big effects on the game? Not really. The character isn’t part of the main story line anymore after that, you only get some people referencing the difference. But if FELT important.
Think about the polar opposite: Choices that change the entire game, but you aren’t invested in. Would those be interesting choices, or would that just be 2 games in the form of one, and the choice is just a kind of “game select screen”.
Escort quests! Especially when the person you’re escorting moves incredibly slow (except when running toward obvious danger).
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.
Like: advanced phisics engines - some of my favourite games are phisics sandboxes
Dislike: equipment durability - it rarely adds any difficultyand is most times an anoyence
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.
Weapon durability is fine when done well, like the Soulsborne games.
I hate it on Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
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).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 not super painful in Soulsborne games but it’s still enough of an annoyance they got rid of it in Elden Ring.
The fear mechanic in games like Diablo is really obnoxious to me. Having my character run halfway across the screen uncontrollably over and over during a fight is super fun!
Pretty much any mechanic that just takes away control from the player is a bad one. It’s much better when the player can affect a negative event in some way in order to lessen the event, or just bring it to an end. I bet a fear mechanic that at least allowed you to steer your panicking character would make it a lot more palatable.
IMO reversed input is acceptable to me. If you were walking right you’re flee left. If you were fleeing left, you’ll walk right.
Adds fun strategy in multiplayer
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.
What I always hate is when the dialogue option description doesn’t really match the dialogue your character then says.
The Mass Effect games are absolutely notorious for this.
You press the option that says “I am not so sure about that” and you character goes “You are a lying piece of shit!” *Clementine will remember this.
Life is Strange: True Colors burned me so many times with this
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 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.
Hate soulslike stuff other than combat, bonus points when there’s no checkpoint before a boss fight so you have to redo 50 fights just to die again and repeat the process until you’ve learned the boss moved… or shot yourself. Oh and you can’t pause so tough luck if you ordered food or kids want something. Fromsoft are masters or marketing to sell this bullshit as something great
Also hate unskippable cutscenes, good story like witcher, ffvii remake or kotor defends itself. If you feel the need to do it chances are your story is bad and so you shouldn’t. Just look at ghost of tsushima, good combat, great world and visuals. Easily an 8/10 or better potential but mostly bad story without skips makes it tedious and just not fun. A samurai fetching herbs for peasants 😂 Bonus points if you can’t even pause the mighty cutscene
bonus points when there’s no checkpoint before a boss fight so you have to redo 50 fights just to die again and repeat the process
DS1 I feel is decent with this (could be Stockholm syndrome) and Elden Ring removes the issue almost completely. But Jesus Christ DS2 was awful in this regard. At least they added the mechanic where mobs stop respawning after you’ve killed them N times; I removed every single enemy from along the Smelter Demon corpse run lmao
im usually not to bothered by a few fights before the bossroom (probably because i started out with ds2)
but smelter demon was awfull until i learned the balcony jump.
puzzles mechanics in games that are not about them.
Or puzzles that are completely esoteric or unintuitive. Just replayed some of the Myst games, and it’s like “oh ok I was stuck on this for 30min because the lever was on the other side of the map and there was literally no indication that it was related”. That’s just artificially inflating your game’s difficulty, and it’s lazy puzzle making. Boooo
The Myst series of games had an unfortunate amount of unintuitive puzzles. Most games in that era that included puzzles did.
I’m looking at you, DiMA from Fallout 4 Far Harbor
I’ve been whining to everyone in earshot about all the puzzles in remnant 2 hahaha
Fishing minigames. I hate them with every single fiber of my body specially when they are mandatory for progress or to get 100% completition
They are not relaxing, they are painfully boring
I love hard games, but only when the challenge is fair, if the game consist solely on trial and error, that’s bad
I genuinely enjoy the “git gud” journey, I find it very rewarding
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.
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.
Hahaha. If I didn’t know better I would think you just got done doing that fishing competition in Trails In The Sky 3rd.
limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
In some sense that’s correct. You’d have more options, but you wouldn’t take them. Having a limited inventory forces you to make choices. Yes, you can use that scroll/potion/whatever, because you’re gonna run out of room, so feel free. On the other hand, I think that many devs don’t consider inventory management enough! I think that it’s often an afterthought and could use more dev attention.
What game mechanics do you love and hate?
Hate: instakills. Diablo 4 and Risk of Rain 2 are my current games that have this. ROR2 is not as bad, you can prevent this by getting enough defensive items. D4 is worse about this. You can be chewing thru trash mobs just fine but get to a boss and immediately die. There’s no ramp up to this.
If you play RoR2 on PC, you owe it to yourself to install some Quality of Life mods, like one that fixes or improves the game’s built in one shot protection. Also, auto sprint.
I do. Thanks! I didn’t even realize there were mods.
There are certainly many games that shouldn’t have limited inventories that have them, but I also think there are many games for which a limited inventory enhance the game. I do enjoy games that make me make decisions about what I want to take with me and budget my inventory space when it makes sense.
On the topic of instakills, I always mod them out of Fallout 4 and Skyrim, because it’s annoying as hell that I can be instakilled from full HP, when it would otherwise take several hits to even endanger me.
Inventory management is one aspect of Diablo 1 that I liked a lot. If you played MP, you could either transfer your gear to mules… But if you wanted to play “as the game is intended”, you had very limited space to carry between games and had to choose which items you want to carry with you to the next game. I did a playthrough through the 3 difficulties with Warrior a few years ago and I loved having to make these choices.
