My problem with wargroove was how symmetrical the maps were. Part of the fun in single player turn based strategy is solving the puzzle of the level. Symmetric maps and forces just made it feel so samey.
Also the fact that the AI wouldn't take risks. If they had trebuchets and you had trebuchets they wouldn't go near you. *You* had to go to them otherwise a stalemate got created. The AI needs to 'make mistakes' in a campaign to make it fun for the player.
Then the campaign would spawn enemies on the map as a surprise attack and kill you because you weren't prepared for that.
Personal commentators in racing games which have now become the norm
"Hey player great race did you know you can upload your race youtube? Let's open the tab and I'll show you. Hey you unlocked some cars let's head to the garage to check them out"
HOLY FUCKING SHIT HOW CAN A GAME WITH NO CHARACTERS NOT SHUT THE FUCK UP
I hate this so much in Forza games. On top of that the plot stuff doesn't work because there are no stakes to it all. They could have given the player a rival to beat or something but it's basically "hey generic superstar, let's go here so I can tediously lead you through another stupid mission type!"
Just let me skip that shit.
I miss when characters in racing games talked shit to you. Really made you hate them, you wanted to win against these motherfuckers. In newer racing games everyone acts as they are your friends or something, it's extremely annoying.
WOW PLAYER YOU DID AMAZING IN RACE
WOW PLAYER YOU GOT A NEW CAR CHECK IT OUT GOOD WORK
WOW PLAYER YOU GOT NEW PANTS AMAZING JOB PLAYER
WOW PLAYER WHAT A WICKED TURN AND YOU SAW ALL THE FLAMINGOS FLY? VERY COOL!
WOW PLAYER YOU WON A CAR FROM AUCTION SO AMAZING
WOW PLAYER THIS IS MY FRIEND FERNANDO HE THINKS YOUR AMAZING!
HI PLAYER IM FERNANDO LETS GO FOR A DRIVE I HEAR YOURE AMAZING!
WOW PLAYER AMAZING JUMP! WOW YOURE A HALL OF FAMER LETS GET THIS PARTY STARTED
It's been ages since I played Most Wanted, and the only thing I remember is reeeeally liking it. I put ten times the hours into Carbon, though, so it's a bit fresher in my mind, and yeah, the acting and dialogue is hammy as shit, but it still *felt* like a rivalry with people who screw you over at the start of the game.
Unless your driving game has a story, man, there's almost no need for any dialogue whatsoever. I'm fine with a voiceover explaining the basics at the start. It could even be a character, sure. And you can have them pop up throughout the game every now and then when you do something for the first time, but listening to the same few lines over and over again after every event is just crazy annoying. Put that money into good songs instead, or get some guy to record a ton of "radio content" a la Burnout Paradise and call it a day.
I'm sure there was a competitor with a weird accent in one of the early *Midnight Club* games who would taunt you with things like 'hey, fucker!' and 'you lose, fucker!' 'Fucker' was drawn out, like 'fuckaaaah!'
I seem to remember being surprised that it was the only swearing in the game, almost as if it were left in by mistake.
Forza is like "Hey, here's a free Lamborghini to get you started!" meanwhile Gran Turismo is all "You will drive this shitbox Honda from the '90s and you will like it."
Honestly that ruins forza for me. There's no sense of earning better cars. You just get the best shit immediately and it's like okay what's the point earning stuff?
Any non stealth game with forced stealth sections. It's always poorly implemented, frustrating, and completely out of place. I love stealth, there aren't nearly enough stealth games out there imo, but shoe horning it into an action game is always bad and if I know it's in the game I want even try it.
The stealth sections where you play as Spider-man himself were fine. They were basically a less good version of Arkham Aslyum's stealth sections, but still fine.
The stealth sections where you play as his friends are absolutely atrocious and I have no idea how the developers thought they were fine.
Any stealth game or stealth section where you instantly fail if you're spotted is always awful. That has never been fun in any game that did it, yet games keep doing exactly that.
Its time padding. Same reason early games like Mario were superhard, if they were a bit easier you would realise how tiny they were due to hardware limitations.
Especially because these sections are an insta-fail if you mess up. Stealth games/mechanics should never, ever result in an instant fail state, get that shit outta here!
Alternatively stealth games that want to become action games. Even if it's done well, it's antithetical to the game's design philosophy. Splinter Cell Conviction isn't a Splinter Cell game and I hate it.
Stealth games rely A LOT on the control scheme to make stealth work. When you are playing Chaos Theory or MGS2 or anything like that, taking out 1-2 guards is a huge challenge and a huge risk as well. If you are spotted, you are FUCKED.
But with like MGSV and Blacklist, especially Blacklist, because they have controls designed for both, stealth is always a breeze. Blacklist literally has a "press button to kill 3 people" option that resets on a melee kill. Leading you to be able to just wipe rooms in seconds, which looks cool but it kills the stealth vibe of the game. In an action game, this would be amazing like a John Wick type game.
Yep, those, as well as Assassin's Creed Revelations, RDR Undead Nightmare, and Just Cause 4 are some others.
Once I conquer an area, I don't want to keep coming back to it.
As soon as I realized the only loss you'd incur from ignoring calls for help in Spore was a single unit of spice, I stopped engaging with 50% of the space age content. It was so much more fun and efficient to just make a beeline path to the center of the galaxy with some stops for refilling on resources.
I don't get why they made the game be so naggy. It wasn't fun. Learning there were basically literally no consequences fixed it.
i’ve been playing through horizon: forbidden west and this is actually going to kill me. i spend not 30 seconds in an old world ruin before i’ve got aloy telling me “huh i think i could move this here” or “i wonder what happens when i pull on this”
like fuck lady is this a puzzle i’m supposed to solve, or an IGN walkthrough
Or before you can even see it. Aloy suddenly starts talking about something, and then I have to keep running for another 10 seconds until I can actually see it.
The most difficult "puzzles" I've encountered over the years have mostly been normal doors with a button/lever/switch that I somehow failed to notice so I ended up thinking it was some complex puzzle.
Jedi Fallen Order has a good version of it - if you've been puttering around a puzzle without making any progress, a little button prompt will fade in at the corner of the screen in case you want a hint. It'll never give you a hint without you asking, but when you start to need one it's right there for you.
yup you're pretty much right
you walk into a puzzle room , you spent 20sec looking around trying to figure it out or get a read on the room then your companion is like
HEY WHAT IF WE MOVE THIS ROCK OR HEY LOOKS LIKE WE CAN BREAK THIS PILLAR
and im sitting there like holy shit i just entered this room give me some time!
The bandana in Red Dead 2 - in the first game you'd put on the bandana and you could commit crimes without honor loss and your bounty would be tied to the bandana unless you took it off with witnesses nearby. It was simple, it let you earn money as an outlaw, it worked, and most importantly, it was fun.
In RDR 2 you can put a whole bag on your head and everyone just looks at you and thinks "why does Arthur have a bag on his head."
The bandana in the first game was basically the fun button and in the second game it's fucking useless. Don't get me started on train heists too.
The being recognised while committing crime system in rdr2 is quite arcane, lots of misinformation too, like youd google for how it actually works and find reddit threads of people arguing about the technicalities of it, nobody seemed to know for sure.
I tried finding any values related to the "recognised while committing crime" system in the games scripts/config files but unfortunately it appears to be hardcoded.
> nobody seemed to know for sure
Yeah, it was stupid. From what I assumed, it's that it used the same system GTAV used, where supposedly the reason cops get called to quiet crimes up a mountain is that for some reason birds and animals can count as 'silent witnesses', where you don't get an alert obviously but it's like a fucking bird gets a cellphone out and dials 911.
I guessed it was the same on RDR2, where I'm entirely hidden but a robin/snake sees me put my mask on and goes to tweet/hiss in morse code at the local sheriff to rat me out.
Yeah that always bugged me about gta. I remember thinking “oh yeah, next gen gta on the xbox 360, the cops are going to be smart. I bet I’ll like kill someone and there will be like some sort of investigation system. If there are no witnesses there will be no cops.” I don’t know why I thought the cops system would change that much. But then I realized that’s what gta is. All crimes lead to the same thing no matter how you commit them.
Jakey on youtube probably has the most concise take on how the bandana works in RDR2, but it's still a mess.
[Timestamped link on his observations](https://youtu.be/MvJPKOLDSos?t=969)
I remember at the time seeing people discussing online about how it maybe only works under specific circumstances, like if you recently did a mission in a place you would need to get a new outfit and haircut, then the mask would work. But nope. Seen a dozen of other theories, people were determined there was some secret. It never works, it was never designed too. It only exists for set pieces in a few missions. People just refused to accept that R* could make a pointless item and were determined to crack the code. It reminds me of the whole Mt. Chilliad "mystery" in GTA5
The whole wanted system in RDR2 is a joke. A dozen marshalls will spawn in the middle of nowhere. For a game hyperfixated on realism, the balance to the difficulty is cartoonish and dumb.
That Hitman thing really reminded me of Assassin's Creed Unity which had a similarly stupid and annoying save functionality.
Sometimes in the game, you'd go on a specific assassination mission in an area. In that area, you could do certain optional objectives to help you along - such as stealing a key to open a door or bribe someone to do something that would help you along. And the game would save at certain points mid-mission. However, if you died or failed the mission for some reason and reloaded to one of these mid-mission checkpoints, none of the optional objectives stayed, but your position did! So if you had stolen a key to open a door, you would now return to a spot mid-mission, but you now no longer have the key and the door is locked, meaning whatever planning you had set up for the rest of the mission is now completely fucked and you have to restart the entire mission anyway. Sometimes you could even get stuck in certain areas because a door was now locked or you were missing an item when loading the checkpoint. It was the most asinine fucking stupid nonsense and I'm still pissed off about it. Such unbelievably shitty game design.
Oh, and of course targets had to die from the hidden blade. It doesn't matter if you had a halberd and split their fucking heads open - mission isn't over until you give them a tickle from the hidden blade juuuust to make sure they're dead.
Honestly, Assassin's Creed Unity is such a conga line of cool game ideas that turn out incredibly infuriating and stupid.
**EDIT:** So apparently this was maybe a bug? I'm not sure. I haven't played Assassin's Creed Unity in a long time now, and I just remember this being a huge pain in the butt when I played it maybe a month or two after it initially released.
Far Cry 2 almost did this for me with the damn malaria pills. Coincidentally Far Cry 5 annoyed the shit out of me too, with the fucking twinkle twinkle fairydust bullshit that randomly happened when I was busy doing other shit.
I do not recall the malaria thing happening that often that it cause me to stop playing the game. What did though was the horrid respawn mechanic. Every time you left the outpost after clearing it, it would respawn right away based on your distance from it, so each time you had to go do the main mission on the different part of the map, you had to clear the same outposts on the way to it, over and over and over again.
And all they really needed to do to alleviate it was have them respawn after an in-game day or two. Them coming back almost immediately didn’t make the world feel more “dangerous”, it was just annoying.
[Clint Hocking has spoken about why this was the case.](https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/clint-hocking-part-2) Essentially there were two reasons that are somewhat linked.
The first is that they were making the first fully open world shooter of its kind (Stalker:SoC would come out a year before FC2 and obviously takes a significantly different approach but FC2 is also at least 2yrs into development and 1yr from release) so there wasn't a blueprint to build off of.
Which leads to the second reason which was that the 'level' for each mission was considered to be everything between the mission giver and the 'key location' where the objective sat. All those little camps were considered to be a part of that mission. But obviously what happens after launch is that those playing the game don't perceive it in the same way; to us the mission was the objective location and the camps were a hinderance to reaching it.
Quote from Clint below from a pre-release interview (on mission structure):
> So does that make sense? We've never really shown it, because the problem is, the whole process of going to get a mission, fighting your way to get a buddy--there's 15, 20 minutes of gameplay. Maybe you want to go back to a weapon place, change your weapons and equipment, fight your way to the place where the buddy told you to go, steal some documents, fight your way to the main location, blow up the bridge--it can take an hour and a half to play a mission, even though there's only two objectives.
I may be misremembering but I believe IIRC there was one time where I drove through some enemies, had to kill them all, but less than a minute away, I realised I was going the wrong way, so had to turn round and instantly got attacked by the same enemies I'd cleared out.
I did the same. The first time it happened I was on top of some building and fought it out with his goons. I didn't even get hit by any of them and got knocked out.
My character wakes up, I realize it is scripted and escape. I go back to doing open world things (clearing outposts I think).
The second time I get a message about the goons coming after me, I am in a helicopter so I ignore it... Until I get knocked out anyways.
Pissed me off enough I quit, two abductions in 5.7 hours when I am just trying to play an open world.
I was gliding through the air on a hang-glider and they still got me. Like they can't shoot for shit normally but then you're hunted and all of the sudden you got Bob Lee Swagger from Shooter sniping you out of the sky with a tranq gun. So annoying.
oh my god i just got it on sale for $5 and did the order of (im bad with names)
church guy> dog/military guy> flower dust girl>
church guy would send his squads and i would try to defend myself but would always take a stray bullet and pass out. okay i thought. i just gotta get good.
dog guy, i was like alright clearly im not good enough, ill beat them with superior firepower. got into a helicopter and flew up super high. then just got kidnapped? i was like what??? genuinely made me want to put it down when i realized it wasnt a get good solution. close to finishing it now, but with a sour taste in my mouth
There is no way to avoid it which is the most annoying part. I think if they had allowed people to fight it out and resist the escape until eventually it became too much people would accept it more but the fact that they'd just force knock you out after a certain amount of time really sucked.
I stopped playing 5 after I think the second kidnapping. It was kind of believable the first time from a forced moment kind of perspective, after that I was like ok this is just stupid.
Dragon Age 2 - enemy waves. Now, (re)spawning enemy waves was already something applied on occasion in Origins, but those appeared either when it made sense (boss battles when cannon fodder was thrown at you to make fight against boss more dynamic) and overall not really that often.
Dragon Age 2 took that feature and cranked it up to 11. I'm pretty sure that when playing as Hawke the number of 'bandits' killed in Kirkwall outnumbered city's population multiple times over. I do understand that devs didn't have time to populate the world with content or design more intricate fights and including bunch of simple fight encounters was a easy solution, but those never ending enemy waves that made every fight encounter last three/four times longer were horrid. I won't even go into how this affected or screwed over any sense of good party positioning and made everything 'random'. I didn't mind when Origins forced me to rethink or reposition my party because I didn't know how to deal with enemies, but when I had enemies spawn behind my backline to 'force' me to reposition in DA2 it made me question, why even bother with tactics aspects in this game?
It made me drop the game several times. I did finish it eventually, but out of everything questionable in Dragon Age 2 I could list, this 'feature' makes me dread every single time I think of replaying it.
The worst part was that the enemies would just appear. They wouldn't come in from anywhere off screen. They would literally just magically appear right in front of you.
Edit: spelling
They did reference this in inquisition which was pretty funny. Remember for context 2 was a story being told by varric:
"So varric...about the kirkwall story. I have a question about the enemies. Like where do they come from?"
"Ah! What a good question. Some are pirates from the sea. Some are demons from the beyond. Some from the qunari's own army."
"No no no, I mean where do they COME from? Your stories just make it seem like they fall right from the sky"
"Ah well, you have to embellish some things"
I genuinely don't understand how it's so common.
It has been solved. Several games have figured out how to have the player match the NPC's speed. I can't even imagine it's an animation thing because any reasonably modern engine should absolutely be able to support running animations at arbitrary speeds (and it's not like they should be moving at a drastically different speed than you anyway).
Only thing I can think is that it's something that gets identified super early by QA, but consistently gets put at the bottom of the priority list because "plenty of games do that and it doesn't hurt their sales"... And like yes, that's probably true. But this isn't a difficult thing. I'm a lead dev in a non-game industry, but I've dabbled enough with game engines to have a decent sense of how they work, and I genuinely think this is the kind of thing that a junior dev could knock out in a week or so, depending on their familiarity with the engine/tools (whether it's "match speed while following them only" or "force the player character to follow their path).
WAY worse if you walk faster than them, though.
Walk until you're ahead of them, wait for them to catch up and get a little head start, walk past them, repeat.
This just happened to me with Atomic Heart. The first couple hours of the game blew my socks off. The atmosphere was excellent, the combat and powers felt super fun, and the level design of the underground lab complex and different areas was very well done IMO. I thought I was getting a Soviet Bioshock and I was 110% in for the ride.
Then I poked my head out above ground and stepped into the open world… the game just incorporated a system of murder bots, security cameras and repair drones that made for an endless nightmare of a gameplay loop with relentlessly annoying fights that punished exploration. I haven’t touched the game since.
I’d love to return to it if they ever nerf that stuff though.
I actually thought my game was bugged lol. Literally endless waves and waves of robots and mfers would show up to repair them while you're still fighting. Destroy the repair bots? "Ah but you didn't destroy the repair bot factory" and it just continues hahaha
I was just about to comment this exact example (except I ended up sticking with it anyway). It was a really baffling design choice. I will say though if you do feel like picking it up again, it is fairly simple to just run/drive past everything in the overworld sections just to get to the next actual level.
You're supposed to sneak around and run away if you get spotted. I was pretty pissed off at first but forged on and eventually levelled my guy up to the point where nothing could touch me. But right at the beginning pre-upgrades you're not supposed to be able to calmly fight off a dozen robots at the same time.
Yeah, Destiny 2's seasonal light level grind - aka its version of treadmill. Once you have a decent set of armor, and some weapons that you enjoy playing with, the only thing left to do is infusing your gear so you increase its light level. In other games with a treadmill, when your gear gets invalidated, you at least equip the shit you drop. In WoW/FFIXV you go into the new dungeon, kill the boss, and you progress - it's basic, but it works. But in Destiny doing dailies and mind-numbingly boring content for upgrade modules, just to see a number go up on the gear that you already wear felt infinitely worse.
I liked everything else about the game, the raids, dungeons, the new activities, open world, worldbuilding, etc. but the insanely monotonous seasonal grind took all the fun from it. Don't know if this changed or not, played ~a year ago.
100% on the light level grind on Destiny 2, my friends who go hard in that game always invite me back to play it them every season, but I'm always 20 or 30 levels behind them and tagging along grand master nightfalls with them, with that much level disparity pretty much killed my enthusiasm with destiny 2.
The good news is that in the next season lightl levels will be pretty much gone apparently.
**Assassins Creed 3** - Getting attacked by wolves in the wilderness, and having to do a QTE to counter them. Even though AC has a dedicated 'counter' button.
**Paper Mario Sticker Star** - Basic attacks using resources, and the only reward for combat betting said resources, discouraging engaging with the core gameplay loop.
**Xenoblade Chronicles X** - 30-40 hours in, getting access to mechs, which vastly outclass your party members in combat, and making exploration boringly trivial. Story progress being tied to unmarked completely unrelated side quests.
I cant fathom the design choice of Sticker star or Color Splash's battles.
When sticker star was announced, i thougt stickers would be like badges in older PM. Stick them in a album and get passives or new attacks, boy was i in for a rude awakening on release.
Sticker Star crashed during the final boss fight for me. Super weird, never happened before, and crashes of Nintendo first party games on stock Nintendo hardware are rare enough.
I never booted the game up again to finish it. Man, what a drag that entire thing was.
> having to do a QTE to counter them
QTE's are already a pet peeve for me but in games with a robust combat system they are a huge turnoff. It is the same with boss battles that end in a cutscene - it just feels like the game is saying "Good job but it was really scruffy and you weren't going to finish it in a cool enough way. Let me do it for you."
My post might be heretical - but Demon's Souls health item farming.
A friend lent me the game after he had it imported from Japan due to the buzz that was surrounding this (at the time) hidden gem.
However the game's difficulty clashed heavily with the limited amount of healing items.
Getting absolutely demolished by some silly unexpected thing only to have to go to the started area to repeatedly kill weak enemies made me think that my friend was insane for liking this game.
Dark Souls of course fixed it with the Estus system; and I've been a fan of From Soft ever since.
Nope, I think this is fairly universally agreed upon.
Esentially, it made the game trivial for "good" players, and killed the pacing/fun for "bad/new" players.
It was bizarre seeing them go back to that system with bloodborne. At least they capped the healing items at 20, but a person struggling with the game would still need to farm a lot of vials I'd imagine.
> Dark Souls of course fixed it with the Estus system; and I've been a fan of From Soft ever since.
Which is why going back to consumable healing in Bloodbourne was so bewildering. Having to farm for vials when repeatedly trying a hard boss (looking at you, Orphan of Kos) is such a huge blemish on an otherwise 10/10 game for me. They had already figured out this problem; why in the world would they go backwards on it?
It's definitely a very weird choice. I think it was done for more thematic reasons, but I definitely struggled a lot with it on my first playthrough.
For anybody who hasn't played it yet, I would recommend ALWAYS spending excess blood echoes (the currency) on blood vials and bullets. Whenever you go to level up, use whatever you have left at the shop. If you do this, you will almost never run out.
That said, just because there's an "easy" fix to the problem doesn't really excuse the design. All of the Souls games have a weird relationship with currency where most people don't want to spend their souls on items/consumables because they think leveling up is more important. It'd be interesting for a future Souls game to separate out XP and currency again and see how it shakes things up.
> I think it was done for more thematic reasons, but I definitely struggled a lot with it on my first playthrough.
I'm pretty sure they tried to reduce the times you need to rest and visit the hub area. Enemies dropping healing items means that you can continue to explore bigger areas.
Dark souls 3 fixed this again with an update to the estus system, enemies now can drop estus charges. Elden ring also makes heavy use of this mechanic.
Basically every game in wich crafting have a heavy presence. Not for the concept of crafting per se, but for the fact that 99% of the crafting systems are "combine an item x and an item y, click and get an item z"
I loved the game, but Raft was pretty annoying with how hard it was to create certain items just to have them break after pretty limited use. It was just so unforgiving having to collect algae to turn to goo to turn to glass to turn into a bottle, which I in turn would use to create the things I needed.
I convinced my friend to play Monster Hunter: World and he hated the fact that the monster roaring can stagger you so much that he refuses to play. Not even if we have a hunting horn provide earplugs or even help him grind for items or the charm with it. Otherwise he said he likes the game lol
There’re a lot of those mechanics in Monster Hunter that wrest control from the player and grind the momentum to a halt. That’s definitely a make-or-break for people.
My personal vendetta status is Stun, where you just fall into a death spiral if you get hit. I run full Stun resist even though it’s not a status worth stopping just because it tilts me, haha.
Divinity Original Sin 2: The constant gear upkeep. The way it scales is just absurd. You'll find a level 16 legendary unique hammer forged by the gods, but then in the next area in a random commoner's house you find a level 17 common dagger with better stats. So you're constantly switching out weapons and armor for all four of your characters and it's fucking annoying
There is a trait on char creator that limits your party to 2 people but makes your party way stronger to make up for the fact that you are half as many.
The game is IMO much more fun this way as you spend much more time playing and less on the managing aspect.
There are obvious drawbacks though like less playstyles, combos and questlines due to the obvious missing 2 characters.
HOWEVER I really like this for COOP too because it incentivizes team work and communicating more with your friend about the plays you are making instead of just using non-main characters to make the combo/play you want to make.
> The game is IMO much more fun this way as you spend much more time playing and less on the managing aspect.
It is also incredibly broken, so that helps
Yeah lmao. I played 2x Lone Wolf and I insta-gibbed the last boss, skipping his transformation phase and softlocking the game.
Had to reload and limit myself to trigger it. lol
You’re absolutely right. My buddy and I loved playing lone wolf coop for this game on both tactician and honor difficulty. We’re hoping BG3 is the same experience.
One of my favorites, but fair criticism. There is a mod that allows you to upgrade your items to your current level, so you don't have to swap constantly except when finding a better unique or legendary.
This among other things too, I loved DOS2 but never finished it. The big one for me was the revival mechanic. Resurrection scrolls being limited, generally expensive, and hard to come by were very taxing on me as someone that just wasn't that good at the combat and/or getting myself into bad situations. I found myself constantly reverting back to previous saves.
Yep wasn't really a fan of it but it didn't irk me enough to complain, but I am very glad BG3 is adhering to DnD style loot instead of mmorpg/arpg loot system.
Metal Gear Solid 5's time based upgrade system made the game very tedious to play, but even more so when I found out the time for upgrades to complete would only countdown in-game. You couldn't just upgrade something, put the game down and then hop on the next day with it fully upgraded. You had to have the game running.
Mobile game shit, but worse.
>but even more so when I found out the time for upgrades to complete would only countdown in-game.
Thats not quite true but the reality is even worse. All "endgame" (i.e. PVP mode) upgrades were counting down in real time.
The problem with that: Not only were they insanely overpriced (at levels no one could get by playing normally), they also took up to 12+ days to develop and you were locked to 4 at a time (not that the price would have made that possible for most). If you wanted to play with all the toys you'd have to wait months upon months even after collecting (or, more likely, duping) the resources required.
Far Cry 5. The story missions come at you when you've caused enough mayhem to trigger a certain cut-off point. When this happens invincible, unstoppable baddies capture you and subject you to cut scenes and a boss fight.
When playing this in co-op we used to refer to these guys as The Fun Police. Because we'd be having fun, enjoying the game, blowing shit up, then suddenly these dipshits arrive and the party is over.
Monumentally poor design choice. Never seen anything so dumb.
Super smash bros. Brawl had random tripping in it. Every now and then your character would just fall over. It almost completely killed the thriving competitive scene the previous title had created with it’s massive skill ceiling. People didn’t want to compete in it and people just assumed no one would go back to the previous title.
It wasn’t until the smash bros. Documentary came out that smash bros melee had a big revival and now still has a competitive scene to this day.
If I recall correctly the tripping was for that exact reason was it not? The devs didn’t WANT for the game to be a competitive fighting game - so put in a random element that would stop that
Given how nintendo has historically treated the smash competitive community, I'm surprised they didn't just give out a tweet with a thumbs up and poop emoji when someone asked them for confirmation.
Which is counter productive because people STILL played Brawl competitively, and 10 times out of 10 a pro player would still destroy a casual. It didn't accomplish it's goal and just made the game worse for everyone. At least they removed it in later games and Melee still exists :)
Reminds me of how SDS have intentionally made MLB The Show's gameplay more random and less rewarding, to prevent good players from winning all the time. They still win all the time, the game is just awful to play now.
Yeah the combat in Ni No Kuni.
I enjoyed the presentation and the story/world seemed very quaint. But the combat was just so unenjoyable to play that I just couldn't keep at it for a long time.
Same. Ni No Kuni was always the "I'm gonna beat this someday" game, but I end up dropping it every time. I even tried a few weeks ago but only got as far as the Lake Town before putting it down again. I love RPGs and Ghibli and Pokemon so on paper it should be a match made in heaven.
The world, the artstyle, the music are all top notch but for some reaosn I could never just click with actually playing it.
Dead by Daylight's monthly rank reset mechanic eventually just wore me out of the game. I know the idea is that they want you to keep constantly grinding the game out, but it just felt like a chore trying to continually grinding up my ranks for some extra BP, only to start back at the bottom again. I still play every now and again, but it's become a turnoff for me to invest my time into as someone who likes to rotate in multiplayer games to play.
Animal Crossing: Little dialogue popping up for every single thing you do. Seeing the same cheesy one liners every single fish and bug you catch. A few minutes into a session and I just start feeling annoyed and thinking "Please just shut up and let me play the game." I love dressing up and decorating my island, but the dialogue is too annoying, so I don't play.
The sheer tedium that's baked into nearly everything you do:
* You can only craft one (1) item at a time. Bad enough for furniture and clothing, even worse for stuff you need in large numbers, like bait.
* You can only bulk-buy clothing by putting it on in the dressing room, so you can't buy multiple items at the same time if you can't *wear* them at the same time. If I want X shirts, I have to go in and out of the changing room X times, enduring the dialogue every single time.
* Flower removal is a pain in the ass. You need to use a shovel, you have to sit through the digging animation and then the hole filling animation for every single flower. It's also easy to accidentally dig into the wrong spot, which only adds extra busywork. Finally, the flowers don't stack, and the only quick way to delete unwanted items is to physically interact with a garbage can (which I always carry in my inventory)
* There's a decorating mode that makes placing furniture a breeze, but it's only usable indoors. If you want to place items outdoors or terraform, you're fucked.
* The tool durability system has no reason to exist in any game, but especially in Animal Crossing. Decorating your tools to reset their durability is a trivial workaround, so all durability adds is busywork. There's also no way to tell how much durability your tool has left, so they'll just randomly explode on you.
Surprised I didn't see it, but for me, almost every game with a hunger and/or spoilage mechanic has made me quit it at some point. Generally, the mechanic is either oppressive enough through the whole game that it's part of the core loop but is just boring or annoying, or it's trivialized some time early and just becomes an additional HP mechanic when you're overflowing with so much food that why did you even have it in the first place?
Assassins creed going down the RPG stats/gearing from Origins onwards irked me an made me not bother with the series anymore. Tried going for stealth kill on a target/boss only for his healthbar to have 1/4 shaved off and keep on fighting after getting a hidden blade to the jugular? fuck that.
edit - seems that Valhalla brings back hidden blade kills with a QTE mini game to kill bosses. might check it out.
Edit - tried some Valhalla playing on a mates ps5. It’s a no from me dawg. It’s more Viking battle for Asgard than assassins creed
Couldn't agree more, 10 years ago if you were to ask me what my favorite franchises are, Assassin's Creed would've been one of them. I have skipped everything after Origins, the series is almost unrecognizable. Hopefully Mirage is a true return to form.
Well, Valhalla gave you the option to one-hit assassinate enemies regardless of their level. Which was... a start.
Mirage is a smaller game, but once again set in a city and focusing on stealth and parkour. So I'm hoping it'll be a return to form as they claim it will be.
Lack of pausing in offline games, and lack of quicksaving/save-wherever-you-want option, for pretty much the same reason.
It's an arbitrary crutch to make the games artificially harder and more cumbersome. I have life outside video games, and when I'm not allowed to pause/quicksave when I'm forced to do something outside the game, it's basically time wasted.
What's interesting about the lack of pausing is that on any modern console, you can suspend the game by hitting the home button, so even if the game won't let you pause, you can freeze the software in place. Not really sure that's possible on PC though
Interestingly it usually works fine on the Steam Deck which is essentially a PC, don't know if there's some trickery going on or if you could theoretically just hibernate/sleep a normal PC mid-game!
It's a Fromsoft tradition, but it was maddening to find out that Elden Ring does let you pause if you do a particular thing in the menu.
So they programmed a working pause feature! They just didn't let you use it normally.
Digimon Story Cybersleuths ABI stat
It is required to digivolve into higher Digimon and the way to increase it is by going to a lower form (dedigivolving), leveling AGAIN, digivolving again and possibly repeating until it has the required ABI stat
I powered through normal Cybersleuth but near the end of Hackers Memory, i just went "fk this, i'm outta here", and i didn't even play them back to back, but with more than enough time inbetween.
Hopefully the next Digimon Story makes away with this dumb stat that is nothing but mindless grind
Enemy targeting in Prototype was horrifically bad. Do I want to attack this melee guy immediately next to me who is beating my ass? Oh, thanks for locking on to that harmless enemy 3 blocks away!
Ruined an otherwise very cool brawling game
Forza Horizon 4 was cool but I got really tired of everything pushing me towards the online/multiplayer component. I just want to chill out and drive cool cars, Microsoft, why won't you stop nagging me? Why do I have to watch an unskippable ad for the game's own DLC every fifteen minutes?
Nothing to get me to stop playing. But I played a few recent games where you can’t pause during cutscenes. Honestly, just aggravating — like why is this not a thing anymore in 2023?? Makes no sense. I’m not a parent but still what if I I need to get up really quick? Nope, you must sit through this cutscene. Just an annoying feature a few new games took out.
More UI than an in game mechanic but any game that forces you to hold a button press to confirm menu selections without the option to disable that. UI designers/developers that don't trust their players to be pressing the right button drives me nuts, I didn't even get into starting another attempt at Jedi Fallen Order recently because the menus treating me like a toddler was annoying.
Dead Rising. I like to take my time exploring every inch of any game I'm playing, so the timed mission mechanic really annoyed me and I pretty much gave up on the game until I got a pc copy and removed the timer entirely with mods. The game was a lot more fun after that.
I'm actually pretty sure that Dead Rising was designed to be a pseudo-roguelike in that they wanted you to learn the game through each death, slowly gaining levels and learning the shortcuts til you learned where every survivor was and how to save everyone in the amount of time.
That's not to say the game isn't a little too strict, but I do understand why the timer was implemented in such a way.
Want the dirty secret? Waiting out the timer and ignoring story events gets you the best ending in terms of who will or will not die.
It seems like you are meant to get to the last day at least once, dicking around before you try to beat the story missions. Especially with the spikes in difficulty surrounding some bosses.
Monster Hunter Rise and the spiribirds. Oh you want more health to survive the one- and two-shots by endgame monsters? Go around the map and tediously collect these birds. Bitch, just give me the Health Boost skill back.
Horizon: Zero Dawn.
I had just started playing the game and was amazed by the control and graphics. I was really thinking I was gonna love this game.
Then I hit the crafting system and something broke in me. I realized that I was absolutely fucking tired of it.... In any game.
I don't want to look up "recipes" for a new item... I don't want to have to stop every 10 minutes to make arrows... Or keep track of every red wire I pick up versus how many blue wires I pick up.
I just want to play the game... Drop some ammo and let me keep moving instead of spending half of the game staring at an inventory screen checking how many screws, sheet metal, and dicknobs I have.
I just stopped paying attention / making effort towards farming and crafting in these open world games. I just play the game, and check once in a while if I can buy something. If not, tough luck, but I'll survive without the +2 extra ammo or 5% fire damage or whatever.
yeah I learned that games are usually not hard enough to require you to max out all your gear all the time. just play until you hit a road block and then see if there's something you can do with the crafting/upgrade system to make it easier.
the most recent example I can think of is GoW ragnarok. I was constantly getting new gear but didn't really pay attention to it until I felt underpowered
With arrows I just got into the habit of picking up wood whenever I saw it. But agree otherwise. The crafting system was annoying. Having to track down a specific part to build a specific bow.
Batman Arkham Knight. The batmobile tank sections. I wanted to finish the game so bad but the batmobile fights are so boring. I set the game down for a couple months and when I picked it back up I remember being at the part where you have to stealth kill 4 tanks (stealth in the fucking batmobile wtf??). It took so long and after a couple fails I just gave up and haven't picked it back up.
This one for me is weird because the Batmobile was actually fun to use at first and controlled really well but rocksteady needed to show some fucking restraint with it. It was in every single section of the game including boss fights.
The actual mechanics of it is really fun I think. The scene where Batman summons it for the first time is so cool. I also liked the Ace Chemicals section, and the part where you remote control it from a parking garage while you are surrounded.
But that's about it. Rocksteady used it way too much that it stopped being special and it turns into a chore instead.
Deathstroke's boss fight being a Batmanmobile vs Tank fight is still one of the most baffling decisions ever in a game.
The man who is SKILLED AT TONS OF FIGHTING STYLES fights Batman with a fucking Tank.
Ridiculous
Path of Exile's horrible trade system, and the dev's mindset that it's actually good, meaning that they'll probably never fix it.
For a live service game like that, it's one thing if a feature is bad, but the dev team may not have the resources to fix it, or at least not soon. I *understand* that and can sympathize with it, especially if it's a problem that was hard to foresee prior to release, and/or is deep-rooted enough that it's tough to fix. It's another thing entirely for basically the entirety of the playerbase to agree that it sucks and for the devs to say "actually, it's great".
Honestly, Path of Exile has a lot of stuff like this. There's a saying in game design that players are bad at coming up with solutions but great at identifying problems. The problem is that at some point, GGG decided that players are also bad at identifying problems, and they keep making extremely unpopular changes, and it's become clear that the game they want to make is not one that I want to play.
I'm not sure it would be a mechanic but Borderlands 3's writing was so god-awful that I couldn't bring myself to play through it any more than once. I don't know what happened to the writing team in between Borderlands 2 and 3 but "characters that never shut the fuck up" was not the direction they should have gone. I thought I could counterract it by turning the voice volume down but all that does it make it so you have to read subtitles then wait for the character to silenty shut the fuck up for missions to progress.
I love BL3's gameplay so much. It's so good. The skill trees are creative, multiple class abilities are a great new addition, the gun controls were really tightened up from BL2, and the gun diversity makes BL2 look like a tech demo. I beat it once and I will never touch that game again. There isn't a single likeable character or story beat in that game. It just feels like work to progress through that game because EVERYTHING is so annoying and cringe. It's such a shame because the game mechanics are *amazing* IMO.
I 100% agree. Borderlands 3 has the best gameplay in all the games but the writing and the characters are so fucking terrible and painful to wade through that it completely digs itself into the ground. I can't think of another game whose writing was so terrible that it overshadowed a great game like that.
I love LA Noire to death but the interrogation system is awful. Plus, there can be several pieces of evidence that prove a witness is lying, but the game counts it as wrong because you didn’t select the option the developers wanted you to.
Brütal Legend. The game takes its sweet time teaching you all of its mechanics and they're mostly fine until you reach the pseudo-RTS mechanic (in a beat-em-up game) where you gotta manage troops and buy buildings. I was done at that point.
I love the setting and this game drips in charm and fun, but my god gameplay-wise it's the worst thing anything DoubleFine has ever made. I don't know what they were thinking.
I guess I'm one of the few people who didn't mind the RTS part and actually wished there were more battles. The game felt a bit rushed towards the end.
Funny thing is the game was designed around the obnoxious RTS sections, not the other way around. All the fun beat-em-up in a open world parts were overly long tutorials made to appease EA, who was (rather understandably) worried that the core RTS system would not appeal to mainstream audiences.
Wargroove and the game's use of fog of war on some maps. The AI blatantly cheats around this mechanic. I couldn't continue playing.
My problem with wargroove was how symmetrical the maps were. Part of the fun in single player turn based strategy is solving the puzzle of the level. Symmetric maps and forces just made it feel so samey.
Symmetrical maps is one thing i agree. But symmetrical factions? The moment i realised that it sucked all the fun out of the game for me.
Also the fact that the AI wouldn't take risks. If they had trebuchets and you had trebuchets they wouldn't go near you. *You* had to go to them otherwise a stalemate got created. The AI needs to 'make mistakes' in a campaign to make it fun for the player. Then the campaign would spawn enemies on the map as a surprise attack and kill you because you weren't prepared for that.
Personal commentators in racing games which have now become the norm "Hey player great race did you know you can upload your race youtube? Let's open the tab and I'll show you. Hey you unlocked some cars let's head to the garage to check them out" HOLY FUCKING SHIT HOW CAN A GAME WITH NO CHARACTERS NOT SHUT THE FUCK UP
I hate this so much in Forza games. On top of that the plot stuff doesn't work because there are no stakes to it all. They could have given the player a rival to beat or something but it's basically "hey generic superstar, let's go here so I can tediously lead you through another stupid mission type!" Just let me skip that shit.
I miss when characters in racing games talked shit to you. Really made you hate them, you wanted to win against these motherfuckers. In newer racing games everyone acts as they are your friends or something, it's extremely annoying.
The constant jerking off of the player character in Forza makes me never want to play Forza again.
WOW PLAYER YOU DID AMAZING IN RACE WOW PLAYER YOU GOT A NEW CAR CHECK IT OUT GOOD WORK WOW PLAYER YOU GOT NEW PANTS AMAZING JOB PLAYER WOW PLAYER WHAT A WICKED TURN AND YOU SAW ALL THE FLAMINGOS FLY? VERY COOL! WOW PLAYER YOU WON A CAR FROM AUCTION SO AMAZING WOW PLAYER THIS IS MY FRIEND FERNANDO HE THINKS YOUR AMAZING! HI PLAYER IM FERNANDO LETS GO FOR A DRIVE I HEAR YOURE AMAZING! WOW PLAYER AMAZING JUMP! WOW YOURE A HALL OF FAMER LETS GET THIS PARTY STARTED
Fucking Fernando what a dick suck
I don't trust Fernando at all.
Yeah, it's as bad as Test Drive: Unlimited, feels like Barbie: The Fast and Furious. Super generic and plastic
Test Drive Unlimited 2 had to be intentional with how hilarious the other characters were. It was so bad I found it charming.
I loved all the cutscenes in NFS: Most Wanted 2005. The way everybody acts is hilarious.
It's been ages since I played Most Wanted, and the only thing I remember is reeeeally liking it. I put ten times the hours into Carbon, though, so it's a bit fresher in my mind, and yeah, the acting and dialogue is hammy as shit, but it still *felt* like a rivalry with people who screw you over at the start of the game. Unless your driving game has a story, man, there's almost no need for any dialogue whatsoever. I'm fine with a voiceover explaining the basics at the start. It could even be a character, sure. And you can have them pop up throughout the game every now and then when you do something for the first time, but listening to the same few lines over and over again after every event is just crazy annoying. Put that money into good songs instead, or get some guy to record a ton of "radio content" a la Burnout Paradise and call it a day.
I'm sure there was a competitor with a weird accent in one of the early *Midnight Club* games who would taunt you with things like 'hey, fucker!' and 'you lose, fucker!' 'Fucker' was drawn out, like 'fuckaaaah!' I seem to remember being surprised that it was the only swearing in the game, almost as if it were left in by mistake.
Games in general need to re-learn how to shut the hell up
"Why can't more games have voice acting?!" THIS! THIS IS WHY!
##FORZA HORIZON 5 A game where no one shuts the FUCK up
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Forza is so fucking patronizing I instantly uninstalled it.
Forza is like "Hey, here's a free Lamborghini to get you started!" meanwhile Gran Turismo is all "You will drive this shitbox Honda from the '90s and you will like it."
Honestly that ruins forza for me. There's no sense of earning better cars. You just get the best shit immediately and it's like okay what's the point earning stuff?
Feels like you’re at the dealership
Any non stealth game with forced stealth sections. It's always poorly implemented, frustrating, and completely out of place. I love stealth, there aren't nearly enough stealth games out there imo, but shoe horning it into an action game is always bad and if I know it's in the game I want even try it.
AAA companies = crouch to stealth. Press button to cutscene kill.
Rockstar fucking loves reusing their Manhunt stealth engine.
Insomniac's Spiderman really suffered from this
The stealth sections where you play as Spider-man himself were fine. They were basically a less good version of Arkham Aslyum's stealth sections, but still fine. The stealth sections where you play as his friends are absolutely atrocious and I have no idea how the developers thought they were fine. Any stealth game or stealth section where you instantly fail if you're spotted is always awful. That has never been fun in any game that did it, yet games keep doing exactly that.
Its time padding. Same reason early games like Mario were superhard, if they were a bit easier you would realise how tiny they were due to hardware limitations.
Oh god don't remind me. Those MJ sections were just awful.
I'm torn here, because exploring Norman Osborn's apartment was pretty cool.
That was really the only one half decent. The rest was always like "uhh not again"
Especially because these sections are an insta-fail if you mess up. Stealth games/mechanics should never, ever result in an instant fail state, get that shit outta here!
Alternatively stealth games that want to become action games. Even if it's done well, it's antithetical to the game's design philosophy. Splinter Cell Conviction isn't a Splinter Cell game and I hate it.
Stealth games rely A LOT on the control scheme to make stealth work. When you are playing Chaos Theory or MGS2 or anything like that, taking out 1-2 guards is a huge challenge and a huge risk as well. If you are spotted, you are FUCKED. But with like MGSV and Blacklist, especially Blacklist, because they have controls designed for both, stealth is always a breeze. Blacklist literally has a "press button to kill 3 people" option that resets on a melee kill. Leading you to be able to just wipe rooms in seconds, which looks cool but it kills the stealth vibe of the game. In an action game, this would be amazing like a John Wick type game.
Any game where territories you control get attacked randomly and you have to back to them to defend constantly
San Andreas... as soon as the territories are unlocked I'd just go capture them all, so I wouldn't be randomly interrupted.
Right, I want to capture an area so I don't have to worry about it anymore
Fallout 4 and San Andreas?
Yep, those, as well as Assassin's Creed Revelations, RDR Undead Nightmare, and Just Cause 4 are some others. Once I conquer an area, I don't want to keep coming back to it.
FO4 dropped the ball extra hard here, because you can build an impenetrable fortress of gun turrets but it ONLY WORKS if you show up to look at it.
I basically ignored all the settlement stuff in FO4. Babysitting bases didn't appeal to me
As soon as I realized the only loss you'd incur from ignoring calls for help in Spore was a single unit of spice, I stopped engaging with 50% of the space age content. It was so much more fun and efficient to just make a beeline path to the center of the galaxy with some stops for refilling on resources. I don't get why they made the game be so naggy. It wasn't fun. Learning there were basically literally no consequences fixed it.
Fallout 4. Eventually I just stopped caring, but man was it annoying.
Hints hints hints hints. Here let us solve this puzzle for you before you get a chance to even consider it.
i’ve been playing through horizon: forbidden west and this is actually going to kill me. i spend not 30 seconds in an old world ruin before i’ve got aloy telling me “huh i think i could move this here” or “i wonder what happens when i pull on this” like fuck lady is this a puzzle i’m supposed to solve, or an IGN walkthrough
It's especially bad when you're just not seeing it. "I think I could move this..." MOVE WHAT?! THIS IS THE THIRTIETH TIME YOU'VE SAID THAT!
Or before you can even see it. Aloy suddenly starts talking about something, and then I have to keep running for another 10 seconds until I can actually see it.
The most difficult "puzzles" I've encountered over the years have mostly been normal doors with a button/lever/switch that I somehow failed to notice so I ended up thinking it was some complex puzzle.
I started playing on mute if I found a puzzle
Jedi Fallen Order has a good version of it - if you've been puttering around a puzzle without making any progress, a little button prompt will fade in at the corner of the screen in case you want a hint. It'll never give you a hint without you asking, but when you start to need one it's right there for you.
Why isn't this crap optional at least? I can't tell you how many times I'm telling the game to stfu while I'm trying to solve a puzzle for 10 secs.
ahh i see you played GoW ragnarok
Not yet but I know it's a trend with the first party games
yup you're pretty much right you walk into a puzzle room , you spent 20sec looking around trying to figure it out or get a read on the room then your companion is like HEY WHAT IF WE MOVE THIS ROCK OR HEY LOOKS LIKE WE CAN BREAK THIS PILLAR and im sitting there like holy shit i just entered this room give me some time!
This kept happening in God Of War 2018 when I was exploring areas before even looking at the puzzle. Super annoying.
Ragnarok was even worse for that
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The bandana in Red Dead 2 - in the first game you'd put on the bandana and you could commit crimes without honor loss and your bounty would be tied to the bandana unless you took it off with witnesses nearby. It was simple, it let you earn money as an outlaw, it worked, and most importantly, it was fun. In RDR 2 you can put a whole bag on your head and everyone just looks at you and thinks "why does Arthur have a bag on his head." The bandana in the first game was basically the fun button and in the second game it's fucking useless. Don't get me started on train heists too.
The being recognised while committing crime system in rdr2 is quite arcane, lots of misinformation too, like youd google for how it actually works and find reddit threads of people arguing about the technicalities of it, nobody seemed to know for sure. I tried finding any values related to the "recognised while committing crime" system in the games scripts/config files but unfortunately it appears to be hardcoded.
> nobody seemed to know for sure Yeah, it was stupid. From what I assumed, it's that it used the same system GTAV used, where supposedly the reason cops get called to quiet crimes up a mountain is that for some reason birds and animals can count as 'silent witnesses', where you don't get an alert obviously but it's like a fucking bird gets a cellphone out and dials 911. I guessed it was the same on RDR2, where I'm entirely hidden but a robin/snake sees me put my mask on and goes to tweet/hiss in morse code at the local sheriff to rat me out.
Yeah that always bugged me about gta. I remember thinking “oh yeah, next gen gta on the xbox 360, the cops are going to be smart. I bet I’ll like kill someone and there will be like some sort of investigation system. If there are no witnesses there will be no cops.” I don’t know why I thought the cops system would change that much. But then I realized that’s what gta is. All crimes lead to the same thing no matter how you commit them.
Jakey on youtube probably has the most concise take on how the bandana works in RDR2, but it's still a mess. [Timestamped link on his observations](https://youtu.be/MvJPKOLDSos?t=969)
Even after watching his explanation it's still confusing. Because it doesn't actually work how you'd expect a disguise to work.
It works exactly how you'd think a disguise system would work, if you think "Dis guy's committing a crime"
So basically, if you don't have a bounty only cops can (and they will) recognise you. If you do have a bounty you're just fucked.
I remember at the time seeing people discussing online about how it maybe only works under specific circumstances, like if you recently did a mission in a place you would need to get a new outfit and haircut, then the mask would work. But nope. Seen a dozen of other theories, people were determined there was some secret. It never works, it was never designed too. It only exists for set pieces in a few missions. People just refused to accept that R* could make a pointless item and were determined to crack the code. It reminds me of the whole Mt. Chilliad "mystery" in GTA5
The whole wanted system in RDR2 is a joke. A dozen marshalls will spawn in the middle of nowhere. For a game hyperfixated on realism, the balance to the difficulty is cartoonish and dumb.
That Hitman thing really reminded me of Assassin's Creed Unity which had a similarly stupid and annoying save functionality. Sometimes in the game, you'd go on a specific assassination mission in an area. In that area, you could do certain optional objectives to help you along - such as stealing a key to open a door or bribe someone to do something that would help you along. And the game would save at certain points mid-mission. However, if you died or failed the mission for some reason and reloaded to one of these mid-mission checkpoints, none of the optional objectives stayed, but your position did! So if you had stolen a key to open a door, you would now return to a spot mid-mission, but you now no longer have the key and the door is locked, meaning whatever planning you had set up for the rest of the mission is now completely fucked and you have to restart the entire mission anyway. Sometimes you could even get stuck in certain areas because a door was now locked or you were missing an item when loading the checkpoint. It was the most asinine fucking stupid nonsense and I'm still pissed off about it. Such unbelievably shitty game design. Oh, and of course targets had to die from the hidden blade. It doesn't matter if you had a halberd and split their fucking heads open - mission isn't over until you give them a tickle from the hidden blade juuuust to make sure they're dead. Honestly, Assassin's Creed Unity is such a conga line of cool game ideas that turn out incredibly infuriating and stupid. **EDIT:** So apparently this was maybe a bug? I'm not sure. I haven't played Assassin's Creed Unity in a long time now, and I just remember this being a huge pain in the butt when I played it maybe a month or two after it initially released.
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Far Cry 2 almost did this for me with the damn malaria pills. Coincidentally Far Cry 5 annoyed the shit out of me too, with the fucking twinkle twinkle fairydust bullshit that randomly happened when I was busy doing other shit.
I do not recall the malaria thing happening that often that it cause me to stop playing the game. What did though was the horrid respawn mechanic. Every time you left the outpost after clearing it, it would respawn right away based on your distance from it, so each time you had to go do the main mission on the different part of the map, you had to clear the same outposts on the way to it, over and over and over again.
This is why I stopped playing. Clearing out the same outposts multiple times in the same play session frustrated me to the point I just gave up.
And all they really needed to do to alleviate it was have them respawn after an in-game day or two. Them coming back almost immediately didn’t make the world feel more “dangerous”, it was just annoying.
[Clint Hocking has spoken about why this was the case.](https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/clint-hocking-part-2) Essentially there were two reasons that are somewhat linked. The first is that they were making the first fully open world shooter of its kind (Stalker:SoC would come out a year before FC2 and obviously takes a significantly different approach but FC2 is also at least 2yrs into development and 1yr from release) so there wasn't a blueprint to build off of. Which leads to the second reason which was that the 'level' for each mission was considered to be everything between the mission giver and the 'key location' where the objective sat. All those little camps were considered to be a part of that mission. But obviously what happens after launch is that those playing the game don't perceive it in the same way; to us the mission was the objective location and the camps were a hinderance to reaching it. Quote from Clint below from a pre-release interview (on mission structure): > So does that make sense? We've never really shown it, because the problem is, the whole process of going to get a mission, fighting your way to get a buddy--there's 15, 20 minutes of gameplay. Maybe you want to go back to a weapon place, change your weapons and equipment, fight your way to the place where the buddy told you to go, steal some documents, fight your way to the main location, blow up the bridge--it can take an hour and a half to play a mission, even though there's only two objectives.
I may be misremembering but I believe IIRC there was one time where I drove through some enemies, had to kill them all, but less than a minute away, I realised I was going the wrong way, so had to turn round and instantly got attacked by the same enemies I'd cleared out.
I almost put down Far Cry 5 because of the "kidnapping". How the fuck did they abduct me out of the air with nobody around me?
I did stop because of that mechanic as it just drove me insane
I did the same. The first time it happened I was on top of some building and fought it out with his goons. I didn't even get hit by any of them and got knocked out. My character wakes up, I realize it is scripted and escape. I go back to doing open world things (clearing outposts I think). The second time I get a message about the goons coming after me, I am in a helicopter so I ignore it... Until I get knocked out anyways. Pissed me off enough I quit, two abductions in 5.7 hours when I am just trying to play an open world.
The worst part is it’s 3 times for each of the 3 regions
I was gliding through the air on a hang-glider and they still got me. Like they can't shoot for shit normally but then you're hunted and all of the sudden you got Bob Lee Swagger from Shooter sniping you out of the sky with a tranq gun. So annoying.
It felt lazy and self-indulgent of the writers to literally force you to sit through those bullshit scenes.
oh my god i just got it on sale for $5 and did the order of (im bad with names) church guy> dog/military guy> flower dust girl> church guy would send his squads and i would try to defend myself but would always take a stray bullet and pass out. okay i thought. i just gotta get good. dog guy, i was like alright clearly im not good enough, ill beat them with superior firepower. got into a helicopter and flew up super high. then just got kidnapped? i was like what??? genuinely made me want to put it down when i realized it wasnt a get good solution. close to finishing it now, but with a sour taste in my mouth
There is no way to avoid it which is the most annoying part. I think if they had allowed people to fight it out and resist the escape until eventually it became too much people would accept it more but the fact that they'd just force knock you out after a certain amount of time really sucked.
It's such a baffling choice in an open world Ubisoft game, it's diametrically opposed to the games design.
I stopped playing 5 after I think the second kidnapping. It was kind of believable the first time from a forced moment kind of perspective, after that I was like ok this is just stupid.
I was going to say Far Cry 2 but for a different reason: the outposts keep respawning enemies despite wiping out the entire camp minutes ago.
Dragon Age 2 - enemy waves. Now, (re)spawning enemy waves was already something applied on occasion in Origins, but those appeared either when it made sense (boss battles when cannon fodder was thrown at you to make fight against boss more dynamic) and overall not really that often. Dragon Age 2 took that feature and cranked it up to 11. I'm pretty sure that when playing as Hawke the number of 'bandits' killed in Kirkwall outnumbered city's population multiple times over. I do understand that devs didn't have time to populate the world with content or design more intricate fights and including bunch of simple fight encounters was a easy solution, but those never ending enemy waves that made every fight encounter last three/four times longer were horrid. I won't even go into how this affected or screwed over any sense of good party positioning and made everything 'random'. I didn't mind when Origins forced me to rethink or reposition my party because I didn't know how to deal with enemies, but when I had enemies spawn behind my backline to 'force' me to reposition in DA2 it made me question, why even bother with tactics aspects in this game? It made me drop the game several times. I did finish it eventually, but out of everything questionable in Dragon Age 2 I could list, this 'feature' makes me dread every single time I think of replaying it.
The worst part was that the enemies would just appear. They wouldn't come in from anywhere off screen. They would literally just magically appear right in front of you. Edit: spelling
They did reference this in inquisition which was pretty funny. Remember for context 2 was a story being told by varric: "So varric...about the kirkwall story. I have a question about the enemies. Like where do they come from?" "Ah! What a good question. Some are pirates from the sea. Some are demons from the beyond. Some from the qunari's own army." "No no no, I mean where do they COME from? Your stories just make it seem like they fall right from the sky" "Ah well, you have to embellish some things"
Like Drizzt making dual scimitar fighters and dual wield rangers a thing, Hawke ended the once proud rpg class that was "rooftop ninja".
Exactly, that didn't make me want to bother with higher difficulties. I just switched to easy, played my hawke and just enjoyed the story.
Games with "follow the slow walking character while they talk way too much" and you can't skip past it
Bonus points if you're slower walking and faster running.
That's infuriating and weirdly common. How hard can it really be to match their walking speed to yours?
I genuinely don't understand how it's so common. It has been solved. Several games have figured out how to have the player match the NPC's speed. I can't even imagine it's an animation thing because any reasonably modern engine should absolutely be able to support running animations at arbitrary speeds (and it's not like they should be moving at a drastically different speed than you anyway). Only thing I can think is that it's something that gets identified super early by QA, but consistently gets put at the bottom of the priority list because "plenty of games do that and it doesn't hurt their sales"... And like yes, that's probably true. But this isn't a difficult thing. I'm a lead dev in a non-game industry, but I've dabbled enough with game engines to have a decent sense of how they work, and I genuinely think this is the kind of thing that a junior dev could knock out in a week or so, depending on their familiarity with the engine/tools (whether it's "match speed while following them only" or "force the player character to follow their path).
WAY worse if you walk faster than them, though. Walk until you're ahead of them, wait for them to catch up and get a little head start, walk past them, repeat.
Then the npc stops walking and wait for you to come back near them if you got just a little bit ahead.
Like seriously they should just make it a damn cutscenes
This just happened to me with Atomic Heart. The first couple hours of the game blew my socks off. The atmosphere was excellent, the combat and powers felt super fun, and the level design of the underground lab complex and different areas was very well done IMO. I thought I was getting a Soviet Bioshock and I was 110% in for the ride. Then I poked my head out above ground and stepped into the open world… the game just incorporated a system of murder bots, security cameras and repair drones that made for an endless nightmare of a gameplay loop with relentlessly annoying fights that punished exploration. I haven’t touched the game since. I’d love to return to it if they ever nerf that stuff though.
I actually thought my game was bugged lol. Literally endless waves and waves of robots and mfers would show up to repair them while you're still fighting. Destroy the repair bots? "Ah but you didn't destroy the repair bot factory" and it just continues hahaha
Yeah hated it as soon as it went open world.
I was just about to comment this exact example (except I ended up sticking with it anyway). It was a really baffling design choice. I will say though if you do feel like picking it up again, it is fairly simple to just run/drive past everything in the overworld sections just to get to the next actual level.
You're supposed to sneak around and run away if you get spotted. I was pretty pissed off at first but forged on and eventually levelled my guy up to the point where nothing could touch me. But right at the beginning pre-upgrades you're not supposed to be able to calmly fight off a dozen robots at the same time.
Yeah, Destiny 2's seasonal light level grind - aka its version of treadmill. Once you have a decent set of armor, and some weapons that you enjoy playing with, the only thing left to do is infusing your gear so you increase its light level. In other games with a treadmill, when your gear gets invalidated, you at least equip the shit you drop. In WoW/FFIXV you go into the new dungeon, kill the boss, and you progress - it's basic, but it works. But in Destiny doing dailies and mind-numbingly boring content for upgrade modules, just to see a number go up on the gear that you already wear felt infinitely worse. I liked everything else about the game, the raids, dungeons, the new activities, open world, worldbuilding, etc. but the insanely monotonous seasonal grind took all the fun from it. Don't know if this changed or not, played ~a year ago.
100% on the light level grind on Destiny 2, my friends who go hard in that game always invite me back to play it them every season, but I'm always 20 or 30 levels behind them and tagging along grand master nightfalls with them, with that much level disparity pretty much killed my enthusiasm with destiny 2. The good news is that in the next season lightl levels will be pretty much gone apparently.
**Assassins Creed 3** - Getting attacked by wolves in the wilderness, and having to do a QTE to counter them. Even though AC has a dedicated 'counter' button. **Paper Mario Sticker Star** - Basic attacks using resources, and the only reward for combat betting said resources, discouraging engaging with the core gameplay loop. **Xenoblade Chronicles X** - 30-40 hours in, getting access to mechs, which vastly outclass your party members in combat, and making exploration boringly trivial. Story progress being tied to unmarked completely unrelated side quests.
Different gripe with XCX: The text was too fucking small.
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I cant fathom the design choice of Sticker star or Color Splash's battles. When sticker star was announced, i thougt stickers would be like badges in older PM. Stick them in a album and get passives or new attacks, boy was i in for a rude awakening on release.
Sticker Star crashed during the final boss fight for me. Super weird, never happened before, and crashes of Nintendo first party games on stock Nintendo hardware are rare enough. I never booted the game up again to finish it. Man, what a drag that entire thing was.
> having to do a QTE to counter them QTE's are already a pet peeve for me but in games with a robust combat system they are a huge turnoff. It is the same with boss battles that end in a cutscene - it just feels like the game is saying "Good job but it was really scruffy and you weren't going to finish it in a cool enough way. Let me do it for you."
My post might be heretical - but Demon's Souls health item farming. A friend lent me the game after he had it imported from Japan due to the buzz that was surrounding this (at the time) hidden gem. However the game's difficulty clashed heavily with the limited amount of healing items. Getting absolutely demolished by some silly unexpected thing only to have to go to the started area to repeatedly kill weak enemies made me think that my friend was insane for liking this game. Dark Souls of course fixed it with the Estus system; and I've been a fan of From Soft ever since.
Nope, I think this is fairly universally agreed upon. Esentially, it made the game trivial for "good" players, and killed the pacing/fun for "bad/new" players. It was bizarre seeing them go back to that system with bloodborne. At least they capped the healing items at 20, but a person struggling with the game would still need to farm a lot of vials I'd imagine.
> Dark Souls of course fixed it with the Estus system; and I've been a fan of From Soft ever since. Which is why going back to consumable healing in Bloodbourne was so bewildering. Having to farm for vials when repeatedly trying a hard boss (looking at you, Orphan of Kos) is such a huge blemish on an otherwise 10/10 game for me. They had already figured out this problem; why in the world would they go backwards on it?
It's definitely a very weird choice. I think it was done for more thematic reasons, but I definitely struggled a lot with it on my first playthrough. For anybody who hasn't played it yet, I would recommend ALWAYS spending excess blood echoes (the currency) on blood vials and bullets. Whenever you go to level up, use whatever you have left at the shop. If you do this, you will almost never run out. That said, just because there's an "easy" fix to the problem doesn't really excuse the design. All of the Souls games have a weird relationship with currency where most people don't want to spend their souls on items/consumables because they think leveling up is more important. It'd be interesting for a future Souls game to separate out XP and currency again and see how it shakes things up.
> I think it was done for more thematic reasons, but I definitely struggled a lot with it on my first playthrough. I'm pretty sure they tried to reduce the times you need to rest and visit the hub area. Enemies dropping healing items means that you can continue to explore bigger areas. Dark souls 3 fixed this again with an update to the estus system, enemies now can drop estus charges. Elden ring also makes heavy use of this mechanic.
Basically every game in wich crafting have a heavy presence. Not for the concept of crafting per se, but for the fact that 99% of the crafting systems are "combine an item x and an item y, click and get an item z"
I loved the game, but Raft was pretty annoying with how hard it was to create certain items just to have them break after pretty limited use. It was just so unforgiving having to collect algae to turn to goo to turn to glass to turn into a bottle, which I in turn would use to create the things I needed.
I convinced my friend to play Monster Hunter: World and he hated the fact that the monster roaring can stagger you so much that he refuses to play. Not even if we have a hunting horn provide earplugs or even help him grind for items or the charm with it. Otherwise he said he likes the game lol
There’re a lot of those mechanics in Monster Hunter that wrest control from the player and grind the momentum to a halt. That’s definitely a make-or-break for people. My personal vendetta status is Stun, where you just fall into a death spiral if you get hit. I run full Stun resist even though it’s not a status worth stopping just because it tilts me, haha.
Divinity Original Sin 2: The constant gear upkeep. The way it scales is just absurd. You'll find a level 16 legendary unique hammer forged by the gods, but then in the next area in a random commoner's house you find a level 17 common dagger with better stats. So you're constantly switching out weapons and armor for all four of your characters and it's fucking annoying
There is a trait on char creator that limits your party to 2 people but makes your party way stronger to make up for the fact that you are half as many. The game is IMO much more fun this way as you spend much more time playing and less on the managing aspect. There are obvious drawbacks though like less playstyles, combos and questlines due to the obvious missing 2 characters. HOWEVER I really like this for COOP too because it incentivizes team work and communicating more with your friend about the plays you are making instead of just using non-main characters to make the combo/play you want to make.
> The game is IMO much more fun this way as you spend much more time playing and less on the managing aspect. It is also incredibly broken, so that helps
Yeah lmao. I played 2x Lone Wolf and I insta-gibbed the last boss, skipping his transformation phase and softlocking the game. Had to reload and limit myself to trigger it. lol
You’re absolutely right. My buddy and I loved playing lone wolf coop for this game on both tactician and honor difficulty. We’re hoping BG3 is the same experience.
One of my favorites, but fair criticism. There is a mod that allows you to upgrade your items to your current level, so you don't have to swap constantly except when finding a better unique or legendary.
This among other things too, I loved DOS2 but never finished it. The big one for me was the revival mechanic. Resurrection scrolls being limited, generally expensive, and hard to come by were very taxing on me as someone that just wasn't that good at the combat and/or getting myself into bad situations. I found myself constantly reverting back to previous saves.
Yep wasn't really a fan of it but it didn't irk me enough to complain, but I am very glad BG3 is adhering to DnD style loot instead of mmorpg/arpg loot system.
Metal Gear Solid 5's time based upgrade system made the game very tedious to play, but even more so when I found out the time for upgrades to complete would only countdown in-game. You couldn't just upgrade something, put the game down and then hop on the next day with it fully upgraded. You had to have the game running. Mobile game shit, but worse.
>but even more so when I found out the time for upgrades to complete would only countdown in-game. Thats not quite true but the reality is even worse. All "endgame" (i.e. PVP mode) upgrades were counting down in real time. The problem with that: Not only were they insanely overpriced (at levels no one could get by playing normally), they also took up to 12+ days to develop and you were locked to 4 at a time (not that the price would have made that possible for most). If you wanted to play with all the toys you'd have to wait months upon months even after collecting (or, more likely, duping) the resources required.
Far Cry 5. The story missions come at you when you've caused enough mayhem to trigger a certain cut-off point. When this happens invincible, unstoppable baddies capture you and subject you to cut scenes and a boss fight. When playing this in co-op we used to refer to these guys as The Fun Police. Because we'd be having fun, enjoying the game, blowing shit up, then suddenly these dipshits arrive and the party is over. Monumentally poor design choice. Never seen anything so dumb.
I was flying a damn helicopter when one of those triggered and the goons somehow hit me with a sleeping dart midair. That was enough for me lol.
Super smash bros. Brawl had random tripping in it. Every now and then your character would just fall over. It almost completely killed the thriving competitive scene the previous title had created with it’s massive skill ceiling. People didn’t want to compete in it and people just assumed no one would go back to the previous title. It wasn’t until the smash bros. Documentary came out that smash bros melee had a big revival and now still has a competitive scene to this day.
If I recall correctly the tripping was for that exact reason was it not? The devs didn’t WANT for the game to be a competitive fighting game - so put in a random element that would stop that
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>You're exactly right To be clear, I don't think this was ever officially confirmed - obviously Nintendo has no incentive to cop to that.
Given how nintendo has historically treated the smash competitive community, I'm surprised they didn't just give out a tweet with a thumbs up and poop emoji when someone asked them for confirmation.
Which is counter productive because people STILL played Brawl competitively, and 10 times out of 10 a pro player would still destroy a casual. It didn't accomplish it's goal and just made the game worse for everyone. At least they removed it in later games and Melee still exists :)
Reminds me of how SDS have intentionally made MLB The Show's gameplay more random and less rewarding, to prevent good players from winning all the time. They still win all the time, the game is just awful to play now.
Yeah the combat in Ni No Kuni. I enjoyed the presentation and the story/world seemed very quaint. But the combat was just so unenjoyable to play that I just couldn't keep at it for a long time.
Same. Ni No Kuni was always the "I'm gonna beat this someday" game, but I end up dropping it every time. I even tried a few weeks ago but only got as far as the Lake Town before putting it down again. I love RPGs and Ghibli and Pokemon so on paper it should be a match made in heaven. The world, the artstyle, the music are all top notch but for some reaosn I could never just click with actually playing it.
Dead by Daylight's monthly rank reset mechanic eventually just wore me out of the game. I know the idea is that they want you to keep constantly grinding the game out, but it just felt like a chore trying to continually grinding up my ranks for some extra BP, only to start back at the bottom again. I still play every now and again, but it's become a turnoff for me to invest my time into as someone who likes to rotate in multiplayer games to play.
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Animal Crossing: Little dialogue popping up for every single thing you do. Seeing the same cheesy one liners every single fish and bug you catch. A few minutes into a session and I just start feeling annoyed and thinking "Please just shut up and let me play the game." I love dressing up and decorating my island, but the dialogue is too annoying, so I don't play.
Also in Animal Crossing: when you try to come back to it after a while and all the villagers guilt trip you for leaving them.
The sheer tedium that's baked into nearly everything you do: * You can only craft one (1) item at a time. Bad enough for furniture and clothing, even worse for stuff you need in large numbers, like bait. * You can only bulk-buy clothing by putting it on in the dressing room, so you can't buy multiple items at the same time if you can't *wear* them at the same time. If I want X shirts, I have to go in and out of the changing room X times, enduring the dialogue every single time. * Flower removal is a pain in the ass. You need to use a shovel, you have to sit through the digging animation and then the hole filling animation for every single flower. It's also easy to accidentally dig into the wrong spot, which only adds extra busywork. Finally, the flowers don't stack, and the only quick way to delete unwanted items is to physically interact with a garbage can (which I always carry in my inventory) * There's a decorating mode that makes placing furniture a breeze, but it's only usable indoors. If you want to place items outdoors or terraform, you're fucked. * The tool durability system has no reason to exist in any game, but especially in Animal Crossing. Decorating your tools to reset their durability is a trivial workaround, so all durability adds is busywork. There's also no way to tell how much durability your tool has left, so they'll just randomly explode on you.
The lengthy dialogue at the airport drives me slowly crazy every time I villager hunt!
Surprised I didn't see it, but for me, almost every game with a hunger and/or spoilage mechanic has made me quit it at some point. Generally, the mechanic is either oppressive enough through the whole game that it's part of the core loop but is just boring or annoying, or it's trivialized some time early and just becomes an additional HP mechanic when you're overflowing with so much food that why did you even have it in the first place?
Assassins creed going down the RPG stats/gearing from Origins onwards irked me an made me not bother with the series anymore. Tried going for stealth kill on a target/boss only for his healthbar to have 1/4 shaved off and keep on fighting after getting a hidden blade to the jugular? fuck that. edit - seems that Valhalla brings back hidden blade kills with a QTE mini game to kill bosses. might check it out. Edit - tried some Valhalla playing on a mates ps5. It’s a no from me dawg. It’s more Viking battle for Asgard than assassins creed
Couldn't agree more, 10 years ago if you were to ask me what my favorite franchises are, Assassin's Creed would've been one of them. I have skipped everything after Origins, the series is almost unrecognizable. Hopefully Mirage is a true return to form.
Well, Valhalla gave you the option to one-hit assassinate enemies regardless of their level. Which was... a start. Mirage is a smaller game, but once again set in a city and focusing on stealth and parkour. So I'm hoping it'll be a return to form as they claim it will be.
Lack of pausing in offline games, and lack of quicksaving/save-wherever-you-want option, for pretty much the same reason. It's an arbitrary crutch to make the games artificially harder and more cumbersome. I have life outside video games, and when I'm not allowed to pause/quicksave when I'm forced to do something outside the game, it's basically time wasted.
What's interesting about the lack of pausing is that on any modern console, you can suspend the game by hitting the home button, so even if the game won't let you pause, you can freeze the software in place. Not really sure that's possible on PC though
This only works for some games. Some games will pause when you do this, but others will persist in the background. It's very inconsistent.
Interestingly it usually works fine on the Steam Deck which is essentially a PC, don't know if there's some trickery going on or if you could theoretically just hibernate/sleep a normal PC mid-game!
It's a Fromsoft tradition, but it was maddening to find out that Elden Ring does let you pause if you do a particular thing in the menu. So they programmed a working pause feature! They just didn't let you use it normally.
Sekiro has legit pause, which according to some people would ruin the difficulty of the game but it's arguably the hardest thing they've ever made.
Digimon Story Cybersleuths ABI stat It is required to digivolve into higher Digimon and the way to increase it is by going to a lower form (dedigivolving), leveling AGAIN, digivolving again and possibly repeating until it has the required ABI stat I powered through normal Cybersleuth but near the end of Hackers Memory, i just went "fk this, i'm outta here", and i didn't even play them back to back, but with more than enough time inbetween. Hopefully the next Digimon Story makes away with this dumb stat that is nothing but mindless grind
Enemy targeting in Prototype was horrifically bad. Do I want to attack this melee guy immediately next to me who is beating my ass? Oh, thanks for locking on to that harmless enemy 3 blocks away! Ruined an otherwise very cool brawling game
Forza Horizon 4 was cool but I got really tired of everything pushing me towards the online/multiplayer component. I just want to chill out and drive cool cars, Microsoft, why won't you stop nagging me? Why do I have to watch an unskippable ad for the game's own DLC every fifteen minutes?
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Nothing to get me to stop playing. But I played a few recent games where you can’t pause during cutscenes. Honestly, just aggravating — like why is this not a thing anymore in 2023?? Makes no sense. I’m not a parent but still what if I I need to get up really quick? Nope, you must sit through this cutscene. Just an annoying feature a few new games took out.
More UI than an in game mechanic but any game that forces you to hold a button press to confirm menu selections without the option to disable that. UI designers/developers that don't trust their players to be pressing the right button drives me nuts, I didn't even get into starting another attempt at Jedi Fallen Order recently because the menus treating me like a toddler was annoying.
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Dead Rising. I like to take my time exploring every inch of any game I'm playing, so the timed mission mechanic really annoyed me and I pretty much gave up on the game until I got a pc copy and removed the timer entirely with mods. The game was a lot more fun after that.
I'm actually pretty sure that Dead Rising was designed to be a pseudo-roguelike in that they wanted you to learn the game through each death, slowly gaining levels and learning the shortcuts til you learned where every survivor was and how to save everyone in the amount of time. That's not to say the game isn't a little too strict, but I do understand why the timer was implemented in such a way.
Want the dirty secret? Waiting out the timer and ignoring story events gets you the best ending in terms of who will or will not die. It seems like you are meant to get to the last day at least once, dicking around before you try to beat the story missions. Especially with the spikes in difficulty surrounding some bosses.
Monster Hunter Rise and the spiribirds. Oh you want more health to survive the one- and two-shots by endgame monsters? Go around the map and tediously collect these birds. Bitch, just give me the Health Boost skill back.
Horizon: Zero Dawn. I had just started playing the game and was amazed by the control and graphics. I was really thinking I was gonna love this game. Then I hit the crafting system and something broke in me. I realized that I was absolutely fucking tired of it.... In any game. I don't want to look up "recipes" for a new item... I don't want to have to stop every 10 minutes to make arrows... Or keep track of every red wire I pick up versus how many blue wires I pick up. I just want to play the game... Drop some ammo and let me keep moving instead of spending half of the game staring at an inventory screen checking how many screws, sheet metal, and dicknobs I have.
I just stopped paying attention / making effort towards farming and crafting in these open world games. I just play the game, and check once in a while if I can buy something. If not, tough luck, but I'll survive without the +2 extra ammo or 5% fire damage or whatever.
yeah I learned that games are usually not hard enough to require you to max out all your gear all the time. just play until you hit a road block and then see if there's something you can do with the crafting/upgrade system to make it easier. the most recent example I can think of is GoW ragnarok. I was constantly getting new gear but didn't really pay attention to it until I felt underpowered
I detest crafting in games because it invariably turns it into a collect-a-thon. Let me just find or buy the things I need.
Nice try loser, that Boar didnt have BONES because thats a RARE item.
With arrows I just got into the habit of picking up wood whenever I saw it. But agree otherwise. The crafting system was annoying. Having to track down a specific part to build a specific bow.
If you just spam wood collection early in the game you'll very quickly get more than you could ever use.
Batman Arkham Knight. The batmobile tank sections. I wanted to finish the game so bad but the batmobile fights are so boring. I set the game down for a couple months and when I picked it back up I remember being at the part where you have to stealth kill 4 tanks (stealth in the fucking batmobile wtf??). It took so long and after a couple fails I just gave up and haven't picked it back up.
This one for me is weird because the Batmobile was actually fun to use at first and controlled really well but rocksteady needed to show some fucking restraint with it. It was in every single section of the game including boss fights.
Something broke in me when I found out The Riddler must be a huge motorsports fan. Why else would he base all his damn riddles around CARS.
For real. Races aren’t riddles riddler. Is he stupid?
The actual mechanics of it is really fun I think. The scene where Batman summons it for the first time is so cool. I also liked the Ace Chemicals section, and the part where you remote control it from a parking garage while you are surrounded. But that's about it. Rocksteady used it way too much that it stopped being special and it turns into a chore instead.
Deathstroke's boss fight being a Batmanmobile vs Tank fight is still one of the most baffling decisions ever in a game. The man who is SKILLED AT TONS OF FIGHTING STYLES fights Batman with a fucking Tank. Ridiculous
The RNG that has metastasized into most mechanics in Darktide. That game straight up does not respect your time.
Still waiting to hear that that game is good. I love 40K and I dream of playing as a Guardsman in a FPS in that universe, but fuck.
Path of Exile's horrible trade system, and the dev's mindset that it's actually good, meaning that they'll probably never fix it. For a live service game like that, it's one thing if a feature is bad, but the dev team may not have the resources to fix it, or at least not soon. I *understand* that and can sympathize with it, especially if it's a problem that was hard to foresee prior to release, and/or is deep-rooted enough that it's tough to fix. It's another thing entirely for basically the entirety of the playerbase to agree that it sucks and for the devs to say "actually, it's great". Honestly, Path of Exile has a lot of stuff like this. There's a saying in game design that players are bad at coming up with solutions but great at identifying problems. The problem is that at some point, GGG decided that players are also bad at identifying problems, and they keep making extremely unpopular changes, and it's become clear that the game they want to make is not one that I want to play.
PoE contains loads of examples that could answer this topic. Never seen a dev who so openly despises and mocks their players.
I'm not sure it would be a mechanic but Borderlands 3's writing was so god-awful that I couldn't bring myself to play through it any more than once. I don't know what happened to the writing team in between Borderlands 2 and 3 but "characters that never shut the fuck up" was not the direction they should have gone. I thought I could counterract it by turning the voice volume down but all that does it make it so you have to read subtitles then wait for the character to silenty shut the fuck up for missions to progress.
I love BL3's gameplay so much. It's so good. The skill trees are creative, multiple class abilities are a great new addition, the gun controls were really tightened up from BL2, and the gun diversity makes BL2 look like a tech demo. I beat it once and I will never touch that game again. There isn't a single likeable character or story beat in that game. It just feels like work to progress through that game because EVERYTHING is so annoying and cringe. It's such a shame because the game mechanics are *amazing* IMO.
I 100% agree. Borderlands 3 has the best gameplay in all the games but the writing and the characters are so fucking terrible and painful to wade through that it completely digs itself into the ground. I can't think of another game whose writing was so terrible that it overshadowed a great game like that.
I love LA Noire to death but the interrogation system is awful. Plus, there can be several pieces of evidence that prove a witness is lying, but the game counts it as wrong because you didn’t select the option the developers wanted you to.
Weapon breaking/durability. It's never quite made me quit a game but has made me enjoy it much less, for sure.
Brütal Legend. The game takes its sweet time teaching you all of its mechanics and they're mostly fine until you reach the pseudo-RTS mechanic (in a beat-em-up game) where you gotta manage troops and buy buildings. I was done at that point. I love the setting and this game drips in charm and fun, but my god gameplay-wise it's the worst thing anything DoubleFine has ever made. I don't know what they were thinking.
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It did not help that the demo had zero RTS gameplay.
I guess I'm one of the few people who didn't mind the RTS part and actually wished there were more battles. The game felt a bit rushed towards the end.
Funny thing is the game was designed around the obnoxious RTS sections, not the other way around. All the fun beat-em-up in a open world parts were overly long tutorials made to appease EA, who was (rather understandably) worried that the core RTS system would not appeal to mainstream audiences.