I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
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I hate games that don’t give any indication of when you’re supposed to do it. They’ll give you some tutorial on it and say “right before you’re hit” but good luck figuring out if you’re doing it too late or too early.
Open world is severely overrated
Especially when they are just a series of on-rails missions with “ride a horse through this forest for five minutes” breaks in between.
Yes, I feel like at least 75% of games that are Open Word would be better if they weren’t.
I agree a handcrafted well put together tube level is superior to an empty generic generated world
especially when so many games like to cram anything and everything into the open world. Yahtzee Croshaw of zero punctuation called it “jiminy cockthroat.” You have stealth, a crafting system, a skills system, collectibles, etc. Like, not every open world game needs stealth. Just because Far Cry 3 did it back in 2012 doesn’t necessitate your character to be hiding in bushes while guards walk past every other mission
I hate anything that stops me from playing the game. Stun mechanics, usually, but I also include quick time events.
The one that sticks in my mind was those dumb water mages in genshin impact. They trap you in a bubble and hold you there for a few seconds. If it’s an intense enough fight, a few seconds is an incredibly long time, and you’re just sitting there watching the game happen and you’ve lost your agency. It’s worse for me because I had built shields and healing into my team to shore up my shortcomings with dodging. It felt clever, but them the game sends in this mechanic which invalidates my solution.
With quick time events, I just get annoyed at the genre switch. Don’t get me wrong, there are cool enough cinematics out there… It’s just… Like usually I’m watching these and thinking, “wow, that would’ve been fun to do, you know, myself.”
Nevermind that I’m too ADHD. Like I have cats and a partner and a phone. If I get a buzz or whatever else, I might miss the prompt. Or if I ignore the buzz, whatever that might have been can sometimes get discarded in my brain.
For positivity:
I love team building. The interplay of abilities, the hard choices with limited slots and opportunity cost. Finding unintentional synergies, or even stumbling on them. Its all a dream, and it’s part of why I love ttrpgs so much.
I can sometimes get so bogged down (positive) with team building I never make it amywhere in the game itself.
Also love me a good physics engine. God knows how many hours I spent building stupid shit in Garry’s Mod. I learned to code before I played that game, so it was delightful to put those skills to use with wiremod as a little kid. LoZ: ToTK I have like 1000 hrs logged just fucking around in the builder spot at the base of Tarry Town.
Collecting hidden items. Ever since Assassin’s Creed 2 with the fucking feathers, I have hated collecting hidden items. Especially when they gain you absolutely nothing except an achievement. It’s like they are trying to artificially increase the number of hours played.
I’m with you when it’s generic, way too numerous items like those damned feathers.
I’m all for collectibles when they’re interesting, meaningful, and not too numerous. But I think most games and especially open world games really just want to pad the completionist time.
Horizon is a game that did collectibles much better, with the exception perhaps of data points (which aren’t marked on the map for some reason). The collectibles in Horizon are unique, have story, and are usually actually interesting to get to. I noticed often in Horizon, they were just so interesting to either get to (the case for ornaments) or had fascinating story (like the ones that unlock images of the past).
Having well placed saved points and QOL features is absolutely amazing. I’m not interested in spending 10-15m running back / repeating myself just because the save progression system is rubbish. A lot more developers are more respectful of your time in that regard so it’s a great improvement
I feel save points themselves are becoming an increasingly archaic design choice. Just let us save anywhere, especially in a single player game. I think most people are just suspending games without expressly saving most of the time.
It’s going to depend on the game. If you’re making a game like Resident Evil, half of that game’s brilliance is in where it puts its save points.
Totally fair. Particularly in survival horror where saves are explicitly limited to highten tension, that makes sense.
Anything that involves the mechanic “defeat all the enemies in this room in order to unlock the next room” is a huge turn off for me.
Obligatory grinding. Like all those “retrieve my friends bracelet from the Torture Chamber of the Bloodseeking Ghouls”. You’re just running around doing the same things over and over again. Finding the place, killing everything, going back, talk to person A, get referred to person B, etc etc.
This is why I don’t play MMOS anymore. They are padded by crap like this.
Escort quests! Especially when the person you’re escorting moves incredibly slow (except when running toward obvious danger).
I agree that is clearly broken and overused in many games but if we were able to actually control the walking speed on PC with a keyboard similar to what is possible with a controller, it would probably be more bearable tbh.
I am a collector, and inventory management is always the thing that makes or breaks an RPG for me. Unlimited inventory is just completely unrealistic, but on the other hand, making an RPG inventory completely realistic is just no fun. Of course I want to be able to lug all that sweet loot home, including battle axes, broadswords, several full armor sets, myriad other weapons, potions, etc. Having an encumbrance such as Skyrim has makes total sense to me. I love the idea of being able to sort and filter my inventory, and store items in whatever container I own. I also like to be able to compare the stats of new items with ones I own so I know if something is a trade up.
I hate storage block inventories, where items physically take up one, or a few “squares”. I don’t want to play a tile puzzle with my items.
This is my line in the sand too. I couldn’t play Witcher 3 more than the first hours because of the inventory management.
I got a zero weight mod so I wouldn’t need to bother with inventory management.
Need to make sure you hoard those hundreds of potions and wheels of cheese “just in case” 🧀🧀🧀
RDR2 has one of, if not my favorite, inventory systems. Your own ‘backpack’ that had a weight limit and could only carry smaller things. Big things you’d have to lug onto the back of your horse or find a cart. All of your equipped weapons are displayed on your person. If you want to swap weapons you have to run back to your horse and exchange weapons at your saddle bags
I often find mechanics that only exist to waste time incredibly annoying. In the case of loot, a limited inventory is kind of that. You could absolutely just portal/teleport to town, sell your stuff, and then get back to playing. There’s no challenge involved, EXCEPT that it wastes your real-world time.
I liked the pets in Torchlight for this reason. You could send them off to sell loot, while you kept playing the part of the game that’s actually fun.
One exception is something like Resident Evil, where the choice is relevant to the gameplay directly. But even then, I would’ve preferred limits on individual elements (Only X weapons, only X healing items, etc.) and having extras automatically stored.
Finite items in elden ring
I’ll never use them
That’s one aspect I like about (difficult) roguelikes. You still don’t want to waste finite items, but if you don’t use them, you’ll go game over and therefore waste all of them.
Gathering mechanics in rpgs. It’s a waste of time neuron activator. I want to get immersed in the world and not walk from bush to bush going grabbing flowers, rocks and sticks.
rpg grinding is a waste of time.
Sorry rpg lovers, I just genuinely hate the concept of level grinding and item collecting for the sake of expanding gameplay time.
As an old school runescape player I actually like grinding up my levels for no other reason than making the numbers go up. Something about grinding in that game feels right.
Enjoyed the way Witcher did it where you just randomly get herbs as you’re running around. Never went out of my way to go find them from memory
The Witcher was actually what came to mind when I thought about games j don’t like this in. Also horizon zero dawn and all the other Sony movie rpgs
I strongly dislike ingame teleporting and pause menu quick travel. I’d much rather the game have more ways for me to get to where I’m going than simply materializing wherever I want to be.
Let the travel itself be part of the game instead of just a way to link the “real” parts of the game together. Make it fun and fast to move around, add unlockable shortcuts, add more in-universe traveling options. Let me get to where I’m going myself instead of doing it for me, and make it fun to do so.
Especially in open world games, not only is this the most true, but they’re the worst offenders. Literally what is the point of making an open world and then letting people skip it? You see everything once and that’s it. If you make an open world full of opportunities to wander and explore, and then players want to avoid it as much as possible via teleportation, you have failed as a designer.
Time is limited. I don’t want to spend 30 minutes traveling from one side of a map to the next if I’ve already done that 15 times. Just let me get there immediately so I can talk to this single person and get this item I will never use.
I don’t want to spend 30 minutes traveling from one side of a map to the next
I’m not talking 30 minutes. There should be options that let the player do it in a few, depending on the scale.
Just let me get there immediately so I can talk to this single person and get this item I will never use.
You’re encouraging bad design in order to facilitate bad content. There also shouldn’t be much if any mailman content either, that’s just filler.
I’m honestly fine with traveling if it’s interesting. That’s what I disliked most about red dead 2 was even with the beautiful landscape and soundtrack and the random encounters, pretty much every one of your 50 trips to [insert nearby settlement] within a given chapter are going to be exactly the same, and you can’t go very fast because you’re on a horse.
Enjoyed the traveling in Ghost of tsushima. Never felt like a choir there
I’m pretty sure Death Stranding didn’t have fast travel, and I think it worked quite well there. Part of the challenge is to learn the best route between the stations, so it’s well incorporated into the gameplay. There’s barely any enemies on your way either, and those that exist are easily avoidable.
Traveling in Death Stranding is the game though. Enemies are only one part of the challenge; there’s also terrain and how much cargo you can carry on the way, even if you’ve taken that route before.
Death Stranding is Kojima attempting to sell out by making a walking simulator and accidentally putting too much work into it.
I found Death Stranding to be a game that, even though it has combat in it, it’s a solid demonstration of how many different types of mechanics we could be building a game around besides combat, even with a story and high production value.
I would go as far as to say that the combat is the weakest part of the gameplay. I did not enjoy the boss battles and had to turn down the difficulty for them.
Or just let me call them on a call phone.
How do you incorporate phones in Skyrim?
They never said Skyrim.
Games that give you rapid and fun ways to travel have been ones that I’ve actually not found tedious to get from point a to point b. Methods I’ve like have been blink (teleporting short distances), grapple hook, super speed, flying, etc.
But, just old fashioned running or driving gets stale fast.
Age of Wushu needed less teleport slots.
I am really conflicted on this, and I think there needs to be some balance or cost/reward. I mostly agree though.
An example I often use about this is in MMOs. WoW felt like a huge world, especially back in vanilla. You could fly end to end and never hit a loading screen, it felt awesome. If you gave me a map of Azeroth and asked me to label all the zones, I probably could. It’s moved a bit more to people teleporting place to place, but I still can fly end to end of a continent.
On the other hand, FFXIV is a series of maps with loading zones between all of them (a necessity because of the older console architecture, I understand) and teleports in every town. You never actually go end to end of Eorzea. If you gave me a map of Eorzea and asked me to label only the three majors cities on it, I doubt I could. It is definitely convenient to just be able to warp around place to place for a trivial amount of currency.
It takes a lot out of the feeling of “world” to just have a bunch of arbitrary areas, I admit. It’s a tough balancing act between player convenience and player immersion.
Yeah, FFXIV makes is super convenient to revisit a place once you’ve already been there via the aetheryte, meaning you’re probably not going to visit it on foot more than a few times. This means you don’t really make that connection between zones (or at least, I didn’t) and thus don’t really view it as an interconnected world (the loading areas between each zone doesn’t really help).
I’m struggling to give proper credit to WoW because I’m not sure if its the staggering amount of time I played the game, the time of my life when I played the game (younger brain retaining knowledge better?), or the seamless transition between zones which lends it to sticking in my memory so hard as a ‘real, interconnected world’… probably a combination of the three, if we’re being honest.
I think MMOs need fast travel because sometimes you just want to meet your friends in X dungeon and all the scenic travel is just an obstacle to that. There shouldn’t be barriers to the social aspect of these games. MMOs have more than enough padding already, if people want the immersive experience they can choose to do that on their own.
Love - auto health or shield regen. When I first experienced that in Halo it made me instantly hate other games that didn’t have some form of that mechanic.
I hate managing health inventory items. It breaks gameplay flow with tedious bullshit that isn’t nearly as fun as focusing on the a combat mechanic.
The Estus Flask in Dark Souls was great. You couldn’t spam a million of them on a boss fight but you also got them all back when you were safe. There wereots of things to dislike but that was a major positive. And to your point, it’s not buried in a menu either. It’s just right there.
Auto health makes the game oriented around taking as much cover as possible. You just pop out, shoot, and then jump back to hiding again.
The newer Doom games for example uses limited health to force you be that cool action hero who is participating in the action. Health is regained by killing enemies. If they had regen the player would just be back to hiding behind covers like cowards.
Doom was interesting because it was a solution to both of those problems at once. Doom shouldn’t be a cover shooter, but hunting for health packs is not action packed or fun, so the enemies became health packs.
I’m exactly the opposite. I feel like regeneration makes avoiding damage feel trivial and doesn’t reward you for playing well.
You also have to wait around hiding to heal INSTEAD of playing the game. Same thing with reloading. That’s why doom 2016 and eternal so good.
Forced sections in AAA games. If you wander left or wander right or jump or sneak a direction it didn’t want you get a mysterious death. Just make it a cutscene if you are going to pidgeonhole me so much assasins creed, or a cartoon movie.
Do huge fucking cliffs and invisible walls count as mechanics?
I know equipment durability does and that can fuck right off.
One thing I love is when the game mechanics are well grounded in the world. A recent good example of this was in Tears of the Kingdom; in one cutscene you actually see Zelda use the Purah Pad to fast-travel out of trouble just like you also can. It elevates it from a gaming conceit to something actually part of the world.
I usually dislike weapon durability (eg, in Fallout), but Zelda is the one game where I actually liked it. Perhaps because in Zelda, it was a central mechanic that the game was designed and balanced around.
For most games, durability is something that the game isn’t really designed around and feels more forced in. When you can repair your gear (as you usually can), durability just means every now and then you gotta deal with the annoyance of repairing.
The annoying part in Zelda was where you’d acquire and destroy your weapon in just a small handful of swings, like the kingdom of Hyrule had the world’s worst blacksmiths.
The new Zelda games are what solidified my hatred of durability. Oh look I finished this quest line and got a fancy sword that’s a reference to an older game! Time to put it on a shelf and never use it so it doesn’t explode and go away forever.
The one thing they could’ve done that would have made the whole thing tolerable was if the special weapons from your allies were unlimited. The Eagle Bow, the Boulder Smasher, etc. At least then you would always have one thing in whichever style you liked that you could just use without always worrying about. Instead those are the most expensive hardest to get weapons and they still have fucking durability. It just makes everything worse and every reward less rewarding.
I agree with you on those special weapons. I dunno why the heck they made those so rare or expensive while also not being that durable. I don’t find it an issue for most normal weapons, though, especially with the fuse mechanic in TotK. I like how it forces me to vary things up and allows for regular treasure chests or drops to actually give you something you can use (even if it’s basically like a short lasting consumable).
