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.
You must log in or register to comment.
FUCK. THE. ALWAYS. ONLINE. PARADIGM.
Not truly a game mechanic but I love the passion against GAAS.
Escort quests! Especially when the person you’re escorting moves incredibly slow (except when running toward obvious danger).
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.
Out of interest, what platformers are you referencing here? I can’t think of any that are that punishing.
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.”
That’s why Celeste is one of my favorite platformers. If you fail, you respawn at the very “screen” you died.
God damn that’s a great game. At the same time, I think they did this knowing that folks would die all the time, so they didn’t want each death to be super punishing.
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 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.
“your choices matter”
Love the concept, but most of the time, they do not matter.
Cough cough Mass Effect cough cough Cyberpunk 2077 cough cough
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.
I think the best I’ve seen it done is in Prey 2017. Lots of really good mechanics driven choices that are actually choices.
Anything that involves the mechanic “defeat all the enemies in this room in order to unlock the next room” is a huge turn off for me.
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.
Need to make sure you hoard those hundreds of potions and wheels of cheese “just in case” 🧀🧀🧀
This is my line in the sand too. I couldn’t play Witcher 3 more than the first hours because of the inventory management.
I got a zero weight mod so I wouldn’t need to bother with inventory management.
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
Time-limited consumables as buffs can be a huge annoyance. In a ton of games I just end up stacking them, waiting for an opportunity where I need them, but usually when I need them, I don’t have the time to stop and use them. I keep ending those kind of games with an inventory full of potions.
Hate:
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.
I think Achievements are useful if they’re tracked separately by each save game. Minecraft does this, and I find it helpful when I return to a world save after a long time because I can use the achievements I unlocked to help remind me what I was doing and resume from there instead of looking at what clues may have been left behind.
I love New Game + mechanics. I think it’s a travesty more games don’t have them.
I hate excessive collectathons or overly repetitious cutscenes or dialogue. I love TotK, but the end-of-shrine bit got old real fast; I found myself missing pre-BotW heart container hunts where they could just be in a chest somewhere. I also feel exhausted just thinking about all the Koroks; I like trying to 100% save games, and the Koroks start to feel like work after a couple hundred in total.
I like when fps weapon recoil moves the player view with the recoil, particularly if the view resets back to where the player was aiming as the recoil cooldown ends. It’s satisfying and also gives the player an odd feeling of agency because the recoil mechanic lets them play “can I control the hose?”
I think Achievements are useful if they’re tracked separately by each save game. Minecraft does this, and I find it helpful when I return to a world save after a long time because I can use the achievements I unlocked to help remind me what I was doing and resume from there instead of looking at what clues may have been left behind.
That only works, though, if the achievements resemble game progress. Some games use achievements as entirely optional bonus challenges…
Fair, but from back when I played a ton on my 360, a large number of a games’ achievements were progression-based, sometimes entirely. That being said, tracking optional challenges within the save game itself can also be helpful in some instances.
For example, if there are challenges that require you to not use special weapons at all, and then you violate the challenge requirements, it could be grayed out to signify that the player locked themselves out of anything related to completing that challenge in that playthrough.
Resident Evil 4: Remake already does this to a degree, though my thought is that it would be most helpful in long rpgs, where it may not be clear after loading where you are in story or what you have and haven’t done if the save hadn’t been touched in months.
Limited re-specing. Playing FFXVI right now and the free, on the fly, just open the menu and experiment respec is a tremendeous breath of fresh air.
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.
Open world is severely overrated
I agree a handcrafted well put together tube level is superior to an empty generic generated world
Especially when they are just a series of on-rails missions with “ride a horse through this forest for five minutes” breaks in between.
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
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.
Enjoyed the way Witcher did it where you just randomly get herbs as you’re running around. Never went out of my way to go find them from memory
The Witcher was actually what came to mind when I thought about games j don’t like this in. Also horizon zero dawn and all the other Sony movie rpgs
rpg grinding is a waste of time.
Sorry rpg lovers, I just genuinely hate the concept of level grinding and item collecting for the sake of expanding gameplay time.
As an old school runescape player I actually like grinding up my levels for no other reason than making the numbers go up. Something about grinding in that game feels right.
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.
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.
I love fast travel, warp gates, teleporting and anything that makes it easier and faster for me to get from Point A to Point B.
“Scenery is pretty.” Don’t care.
“Look at the extra content.” I’ll look if I want to. Don’t force it.
While I enjoy casual and relaxed games, taking forever to walk to where I want to go is neither casual nor relaxed. I wanna be where I wanna be in game and don’t pad on the gameplay hours with slow transport options.
