Re: Gamplay "mechanics" you don't like?

On 19/12/2024 16:45, Justisaur wrote:

Or is it just game dev decisions?
 Mike S. mentioned a few things in another thread, and I thought it would be an interesting topic. Or at least an opportunity to rant a lot.
 Grinding - I'm o.k. with a little bit, especially if I can kill two birds with one stone, such as in ER where I test out weapons on albernaics and get souls (money/xp) at the same time.  If I have to do it a lot in one spot against the same thing over and over I don't like it.  Of particular mention would be something like killing silver knights in DS3 for the blue sentinel's for something like 20 hours. Though that's probably a bad example as I did that grind by helping kill invaders along the way instead, but many people complain about it, and now there's not enough people playing to do that.  If it's offline without chance of getting banned I'm fine with cheating that sort of thing after I've proven I can do it regularly without loosing anything but time.  BL 2 had really bad drop tables, and was similar, I ended up cheating to change the % rarity drops there.  I'd rather not cheat and just have the devs make it reasonable.
 

I really don't like grinding at all and to me character progressions should be based on organic rewards from just playing the game. It's one of the reasons I don't even like crafting in games, I have no interest in wondering around trying to gather ingredients.
A couple of exceptions I can think of which can be considered grinding are Sunless Sea and Dredge but I think of them more of resource management games.

Backtracking - don't like it, especially if it's a lot, a little bit is o.k.  I particularly don't like where like in some of the older games you'd have to go find a key to an area and go back repeatedly.
 Open World - if there's not interesting things to do you can stumble upon, and it gets repetitive boring or like driving through endless fields I hate this. I feel like Fallout 3 is the only one that did this fairly well.  Possibly ER as there's not a lot repetative, but it's just too big, really that's the only game I've ever felt was way too big long, so it doesn't deserve it's own general complaint.
 

That probably tops my list. I don't want to spend time just wandering for five minutes where nothing happens. Why not just transport me to where I need to go. Like you I do make an exception for FO:3/NV as there's lots of interesting content to just discover.

Inventory Management and Junk - So much junk and often poor inventory management in RPGs, pretty much all bethesda games fail on this, BG3 as well.  I don't want to spend my time doing organizational inventory chores.
 

I dislike it more for that fact that there is just so much 'junk' to be collected for no other reason than to sell it for cash, I don't see what it adds to a game besides a chore. Oh a bastard sword, I add it to the other twenty I have. Torchlight II had this neat idea of having a dog companion that you could load up with loot and then sometime later it would return having sold it for you.

Puzzles - Although I've been seeing better puzzles of late, in the past you pretty much had to have internet or cheat books to get past some puzzles in games that use them much.
 

Yeh, it kinda depends on getting the balance right between being pointless and 'forcing' you to go to google. OF course puzzle games are an exception to that.