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Holding a button to do anything/everything. I can see the logic of where it may be useful, but it doesn’t need to be used for everything. So damn annoying.
*Oh, and similarly, forcing excessive submenus to do basic things, like continue a save from the main menu. That should be one, maybe two button presses, not 4+ along with a confirmation. I’ll never understand games with stuff like that.
No Man’s Sky is a repeat offender for both of those things. How they’ve released constant major updates for a decade but never taken the time to fix their terrible user interface is one of life’s great mysteries.
For me: weapon durability.
Unskippable cutscenes. Escort quests where I have to walk slowly.
The worst game mechanic is artificial difficulty where enemies aren’t challenging. Instead, they are just damage sponges.
Math
If I wanted to do math, I’d play D&D.
The computer’s job is to do math, not mine as a player. Any game that exposes it’s math to the extent that a player is incentivized to do math is a failure of game design.
Mate, some of us factorio nerds enjoy that shit
I’m glad for you, but count me out.
Can confirm. A pretty significant amount of the time I’ve put into that game has been doing calculations on paper and then redoing them again after they turn out wrong.
I like maths. What game are you talking about?
I’m glad for you, and I’m happy to use math in every day life, but for me its work. Many games have this problem for me, but take any game with items that have numerical stats as the only way to differentiate them. So to compare two items the player has to look at the numbers. To me that moment is work, not fun. I prefer a graphical or audio representation of the difference. Maybe color or size indicates the gameplay difference. Something like that makes it more enjoyable to me.
Not OP but Kerbal space program is far better when you have a mod that calculates delta V for you. Otherwise you have to manually recalculate everything every single time you make a small change to your rocket. And without knowing the delta V you have no hope of reaching many of the planets in the game
Oh don’t forget MechJeb. Some call it cheating, but ain’t nobody in the real world docking 2 craft in orbit by hand, so why should I be required to do so in my space-lite simulation game? Plus if your craft is weird enough (or your mission has become funky enough) you still have to do some things manually because MechJeb can’t quite figure it out
Often it’s climbing.
I’m looking at you, breath of the wild.
The indie game Sable had brilliant climbing mechanics. You have limited climbing like in most games, but you literally don’t need the extended climbing range for almost the entirety of the main game except for like one or two not-required missions, you only really need it to collect all of the collectables that extend your climbing range. You know how I know? I didn’t find the way to extend climbing range until like the very end of the game. Somehow completely skipped over it!
I 100%d sable and only found it mildly frustrating in certain parts. Pretty good game overall.
I wish there were more games like it where you could just enjoy the world instead of it being all about some missions.
Speaking of botw, lots to explore and find… And none of it is worthwhile or actually affect the gameplay in any real way.
Especially when it’s the excuse for the massive world that takes forever to traverse.
And now let’s convince the entire industry that this blight is a good idea and shoehorn it in to everything
Completing botw became more of a chore than anything else. I couldn’t get all the way through tears of the kingdom. The chores in that one just compounded. I managed to somehow light up the entire underworld and yet my gear was too fucking terrible to face the end bosses.
Botw was very cool at times, but it had a few things that made it utterly frustrating to play. The weapons breaking and having to watch Link go “uhh eeefff eeeff ooof” on the side of a cliff for hours was just painful and purposeless.
To your point, it seems like no game can manage to have an expansive, explorable world that’s actually rewarding to explore. Maybe there is an exception out there but I haven’t encountered it.
Elden Ring has done it best so far, particularly the dlc, but it also obliterated the replay value compared to other souls games with how much empty traversal it adds and now that you can go anywhere you know what’s available and wind up googling where things are instead of making do with your limited options as you go.
I feel like The Witcher 2 had a good balance. You’re instanced in a smallish but very meaningfully designed map that’s big enough to feel like you’re actually exploring a bit, but small enough to actually be hand-designed and decorated and feel like it too
I’ll have to take your word for it, I couldn’t stand witchers combat until 3. Heard nothing but good things about it otherwise
If only it was climbing. BOTW was more like “oh there was light rain recently so fuck you, no access up here.”
Doom3 flashlight. It’s Doom. Not fucking 5 Nights at Freddy’s.
when !flashlight@lemmy.world can give you dozens of illumination options more capable than science fiction has
Alien pods getting a free move as soon as you uncover them
What is this, some X-COM game?
Yep!
Games with inventories where they treat a single gem or a flower petal as occupying the same space in your rucksack as a pair of boots.
Guys, we go back to Ultima 7 with the key ring, the problem was solved along fucking time ago. Stop being lazy and have gem sacks, crafting bags, keyrings, etc for small items.
Not the worst, but I’m annoyed by invisible walls. Just give me a reason why I can’t be there.
Exponentially growing requirements that out pace rewards. I don’t want to spend 10 hours grinding just to level up.
Health as a resource
Time limits / countdowns.
Not a mechanic i guess, but motion blur
If that counts then in-game rendered intros on first launch running in 720p and you can’t change video/display settings until after the game finally gives you control.
I played Assassin’s Creed Origins during a free weekend a few years ago and it automatically set its own graphics settings and dumped you into the game without being able to access the menu so it looked like my screen was covered in patrolium jelly half the time. About an hour into the game when I could finally access the game menu I learned why. It set all settings to their absolute highest but resolution scaling was enabled so it was trying to render graphics my PC couldn’t handle then internally reducing the resolution down to 360p or so. Once I dialed in settings that my computer could actually handle without resolution scaling it looked a million times better
God I can’t stand it. It’s one of those things like “Why do I need that, my eyes can already do that”
To hide poor frame rate, that’s why. Motion blur was popularized on consoles by AAA studios that wanted everything to look really pretty, but couldn’t sustain a stable frame rate during rapid motion.
If you have the FPS to afford it, turn that shit off.
Escort missions
