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

On 12/19/2024 8:45 AM, 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 have to admit that a lot of the games I play involve a fair amount of grind but I don't mind too much as long as I feel like I'm making progress and the grinding isn't excessive.

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.
 

Like you say, a little, okay.  Too much and "meh".

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.
 

Open world is hard to do well apparently.  One suspects because it takes time and money for game makers to FILL all that "open" with something worthwhile.

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.
 

Another thing that a lot of developers can't seem to properly balance. They want to add a little "realism" or challenge but they just can't seem to hit the sweet spot.

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.
 

I'm not a puzzles kind of person.  And one sub-set of this that I hate is when the game forces you into doing parkour.  That jump, bounce, slide over/around/through obstacles for no real reason.  THAT will make me drop a game real quick.

Easily broken quests - I'm looking at you Fromsoft.  The Selvius Quest for the Magic Scorpion Charm I couldn't complete on either of my attempts at a mage, and ER especially with it's length and no save backups (and even if it did often times being broken so far back that you wouldn't want to play over 20 hours again to fix it.)
 

I'm not sure that really qualifies as a "game mechanic".  Just a bug they refuse to patch.

No save backups - Again Fromsoft, yes you can set up an auto save backup mod, but in this day and age it should be part of any game, even if it's only once an hour or something in case something goes horribly wrong corrupting your game.
 

"Get gud noob!"  Hate that.  Just bad design for no reason based on fantasies of how "good" rogue like games are.

Limited character slots - especially RPGS, MMOs, and again Fromsoft.  I want to try a number of different characters and/or builds.  I have 4 or 5 backup saves in DS3 with mostly different characters.  Why can't I have more than 10 characters saved?
 

Not really an issue for me.  I basically stick with one character until I finish the game.

Unnamed/badly organized saves - Fallouts and Cyberpunk are bad with this, you can't easily change between characters as there's nothing easily telling you what saves are what.
 

One should ALWAYS be able to name a save.  Otherwise what's the point of allowing multiple saves?
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I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky dirty old man.