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For me: weapon durability.
I generally hate it, too, but thought it felt pretty fitting and okay in RDR2.
Far Cry 2 as well. Low durability didn’t break your weapon, it just increased the chance of a misfire or jam and made combat more frenetic. And if it really bothered you, you could always buy an AK (which was practically indestructible when upgraded).
I dunno, my mind changed a bit on this once I played BotW. As long as weapons are significantly different enough and there’s always ways to be effective with each, and you get a non-stop slew of them to rotate through, it’s fun.
If you lose any of the above conditions though and you’re just constantly trying to repair your weapon set, needing to pack stupid numbers of repair kits or stop at the corner store in town or whatever to repair your only set, that’s a no from me dawg.
But it can be fun. When I first played BotW I was really frustrated about durability until I complained about it to my friend and he was like “dude who cares, just pick up one of the 20 weapons laying on the ground and keep moving” I realized that I no longer need to hoard all the best weapons and I could just send it, and the game got way more fun.
That being said, most games do it poorly and 90% of the time I agree with you. Looking at YOU dead Island 2
I was thinking specifically of Breath of the Wild.
For me, Zelda has always been about scratching my completionist itch.
Making all the weapons temporary means I never get to feel the power of a completed inventory. Instead I’m just trading off weapons that I don’t like for more weapons that I don’t like. And if I do like one, it breaks anyway.
I didn’t even bother with Tears of the Kingdom for that reason. It’s a feel-bad mechanic, and I’d rather not to it.
Breath of the Wild does it both wrong and right.
Weapons in BotW are almost like ammunition. A given sword or club or whatever does so much damage per swing, and will last a certain number of swings, so it represents an amount of damage you can do to an enemy. This system is at its best when you break a sword over an enemy’s head, pick up his weapon, and then keep beating him with that. Problem is, there’s only so cool weapons can get. Players that want to work hard to get a really cool weapon don’t really have a way to both play with it and keep it around. Hell, the Master Sword breaks and grows back.
BotW does it right with shields. Shields have a use case, and an abuse case. If you do a perfect parry, your shield takes no damage. Same thing happened in Skyward Sword, if you abused your shield too much, it broke. But if you used it correctly, it wouldn’t break. If you built use cases and abuse cases for weapons, for example, bashing a sword against an enemy’s shield would wear it out, but striking soft flesh wouldn’t, that would reward players for learning the combat system by giving them a way to keep their coolest swords around.
TotK…Youtuber Skittybitty did a 3-hour takedown of that game and I could add at least two hours of my own criticism.
Honestly I’d probably give it another shot if they just made the Master Sword unbreakable. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s Link’s main weapon in other games.
But they’re all in on this temporary weapon gameplay loop. And I get that; I understand that sometimes it can be a good thing to push the player into playing the game a certain way. Except they already did that for most of the game. If the Master Sword were unbreakable, you’d still have plenty of players doing the constant weapon swapping, but you’d also have a few more players like me actually playing the game. I’d probably even swap weapons most of the time, secure in the knowledge that I still had a weapon that wouldn’t break when I need it.
Plus how good is your gameplay loop if you have to force it on the player?
But I know I’m in the minority on this. It’s weird to see people loving a Zelda game more than I do, because for 30 years of my life that would never have been the case. Hopefully they return to the old formula for the next game.
I always figured that the Master Sword should have been unbreakable, just a mediocre weapon against normal enemies but very powerful against Malice’d enemies. Like it should have been a 10 sword when not glowing, and 100 when glowing. Because the Master Sword is Sting now.
I can understand why it was polarizing. The game for sure broke a lot of norms in the franchise, and I too wasn’t happy about that at first, because it didn’t meet my initial expectations. But I think the weapon system is designed to encourage the player to explore the game mechanics, which if you just stick with one type of weapon you miss so much of, so I think it’s important to the game that they had it the way they did.
But yeah, I remember hating it at first so I definitely get it. My perspective changed but I totally understand if it never worked for you.
INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE
QTE, especially when they’re randomly inserted into an otherwise action/skill based game.
Or to force you to pay attention during what is essentially a cutscene
“Ah a cutscene, time to drink some wa FUCK” It’s gotten to the point where in games which pull this stuff I wait until the cutscene is over, then pause, then drink. And in games which don’t, I’m usually a bit anxious anyways, just in case they suddenly start pulling out the QTEs.
Mmmhm
Dying Light, I’m looking at you…
Not a mechanic i guess, but motion blur
God I can’t stand it. It’s one of those things like “Why do I need that, my eyes can already do that”
To hide poor frame rate, that’s why. Motion blur was popularized on consoles by AAA studios that wanted everything to look really pretty, but couldn’t sustain a stable frame rate during rapid motion.
If you have the FPS to afford it, turn that shit off.
If that counts then in-game rendered intros on first launch running in 720p and you can’t change video/display settings until after the game finally gives you control.
I played Assassin’s Creed Origins during a free weekend a few years ago and it automatically set its own graphics settings and dumped you into the game without being able to access the menu so it looked like my screen was covered in patrolium jelly half the time. About an hour into the game when I could finally access the game menu I learned why. It set all settings to their absolute highest but resolution scaling was enabled so it was trying to render graphics my PC couldn’t handle then internally reducing the resolution down to 360p or so. Once I dialed in settings that my computer could actually handle without resolution scaling it looked a million times better
Unskippable intro levels that teach the control mechanics.
Unless they’re really well integrated. The first 40-60% of Portal is a tutorial. You just don’t notice because it’s just the game.
Bonus if you also can’t access settings and it’s stuck in a stupid resolution or something.
Make sure the volume could win you a court case for blowing your fucking ears out and I’m there
My favorite is Killing Floor 2 which doesn’t look at your volume setting in the config file until AFTER the intro videos and the menu has loaded.
This is way common. Biggest offender recently was gears of war remake #2 with the loudest chainsaw noise you could imagine in the opening credits/developer logo
Truly. I won’t even think about starting a game without looking at the options menu.
Ancient history now but Black&White 1. “Now you know how to rotate the camera to the left. Next let’s see if you can rotate it to the right!”
In the game’s defence it was still early in the 3D era and there probably was a number of players who had never navigated a free camera in that environment before. Still rage inducing though.
Insert real world money to continue/for advantage. Whether it’s modern FTP with MTX or old school quarter eaters, it’s poison to games.
Absofuckinglutely.
I also hate that gamers in general have been so cooked in mtxs they don’t even realize that pay to skip grind is still ptw because you get more options than other players.
I don’t like durability mechanics when its clearly there just to waste your time or money or whatever. Any game that makes you do more hiking to repair benches than fighting is either getting a thumbs down or I’m going to download a mod.
I built a self-repair skill mod for Fallout New Vegas specifically because I hated that shit.
Breath of the Wild is generally pretty good about letting you explore your own way. For example, the exposition ghost at the start explicitly acknowledges you could go straight to the final boss after leaving the tutorial area if you want, and there are plenty of ways a determined player can reach areas faster than the typical progression routes would take them.
But my goodness the pitiful weapon durability made me want to avoid combat. I distinctly remember coming across a white lionel relatively early and determining I shouldn’t bother trying to fight simply because I didn’t have enough weapons to get through its health bar.
Yup. I played through BotW always holding onto things I thought were good because the stupid durability mechanic made me hoard stuff.
When I started TotK I decided to turn durability off and see if I enjoyed more and I absolutely did. Made the game way better. The only thing that broke was some balancing around crafted weapons. For example you can take a stick and slap a horn on it and get a very powerful, but brittle, weapon. With durability off it just becomes a very powerful weapon, which pretty much matches or beats any proper weapon you can find. If you think that’s too hacky you can just make a rule for yourself not to craft things like that.
Many games have gone through this and time and time again scarcity makes people not use things. In Witcher 2 you had to craft potions manually by collecting all the ingredients each time. In Witcher 3 they just replenish after a rest if you have alcohol on you. 2 is more realistic, but the work involved (and the fact that you had to drink them before combat started) made them too much of a pain and I just went without. In 3 you can simply use them and not worry.
I played BotW with 4x durability mod and it was soooo much better.
I expected to do the same for TotK, but the fusion system made things infinitely more durable than the breaking garbage weapons of BotW, so I didn’t have to mod durability in.
It is a fine line, like in Minecraft durability obviously makes sense, so it makes sense that other games try to emulate that. But then look at Stardew Valley, one of the most popular mods is the one that stops fences from degrading because repairing them is tedious.
I would totally be up for requiring more resources to craft a tool to not have it degrade ever.
Can you make fences out of stone or metal, or just wood, in SV? Because I recall Harvest Moon DS allowed you to make stone fences, which were a lot more likely to survive hurricanes and snowstorms
Yeah you can make stone, iron, and hardwood fences too. Only real difference is that they last longer respectively, but you still need to eventually replace them. Which is still kinda tedious.
Game has collectables scattered in almost every room including lore text and audio logs.
Meanwhile the story NPC is nagging you to move on every 30 seconds on a loop and won’t shut the fuck up. Because play testing revealed most of their players are fucking morons and get lost in one way apartment rooms I guess.
These two mechanics conflct with one another way too often and it’s immersion breaking every time.
Fuck, this annoys me so much. The new-ish sony games are awful with it (Spider-man and GoW at least), providing beautiful, intricate worlds and levels to explore, but if you aren’t sprinting toward the next objective at every moment, it constantly bombards you with little nagging voicelines from npcs or even the main character themselves. I hate it.
First game that came to mind was RD2. I remember a mission at the beginning, where you’re meant to clear out some Plinkertons from a house, and I remember one of the camp NPCs asking you to look around for supplies (or maybe something specific).
As soon as you’re able to leave the area, Dutch starts screaming at you to hurry tf up. A friend and I will occasionally quote him when we’re being jokingly impatient with one another: “C’MON ARTHUR, QUIT HORSIN’ AROUN’! WE AIN’T GAHT ALL DAAAY!”
Act 1 BG3 was pretty bad about this. I thought the tadpole plot was going to be resolved in Act 1!
THAT’S NOT GOING TO WORK!
TRY SOMETHING ELSE!
USE THE TADPOLE!
It’s very important that we find a healer or we’re going to die! But also, you can only get one camp interaction per rest so take your time~
Not really the worst, but my hot take of something I don’t like: puzzles rather than problems. By that I mean puzzles have one correct solution and everything else is wrong and doesn’t work, while with a problem you’re given some tools and an obstacle and just let loose. It’s so much more satisfying to find your own solution that it is to reach the end and realize you were being sneakily handheld through it to make sure you found the only possible way through. I’ve done a few good problems where I reach the end, then immediately reload the save from before and try some different routes just to see if it works.
Puzzles do have their place though, especially in tutorials.
I’m with you except the last sentence.
Tutd should just be direct and move out of your way.
Back onto your main point, one of the things I really like Cyberpunk for was the ability to do so many missions in so many different ways.
Like for the same mission you might just drive by as a netrunner, hack the thing, and keep driving like nothing happened. Or as a Sandevestan user you might slow down time, run past everyone, get thing and leave. Or as a … You get the point.
There are, for any given mission usually like 5 obvious ways you can think of to get it done and the game won’t slap you for it.
On the other hand, the breach protocol in the game sucks so much. They should just remove it.
By the time you’re done the game, you’ll have played that boring, unfun, tedious, not even challenging bs for collectively like an hour.
On my second play through its the first thing I modded out.
Fuck things in games that purely waste your time.
Upgrades that cannot be changed. Don’t force me to replay the entire game just to see what a different upgrade does. I’m my opinion, all games should let you rebuild your character pretty much whenever. I think BG3 did a good job of it with Withers. The price is low enough to not feel like a burden but high enough to not encourage you to cheese it. The only small downside of it is that Withers is technically an optional character you could miss. I think mechanics like this should just be baked in.
I have a dislike for cutscenes. Often during gameplay, suddenly you lost control, often behavior is inconsistent, and you have to wait to be able to continue to play.
The half-life series shows how it can be done without. Story without losing control. Characters do their scripted behavior within the context of the world.
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Auto you lose cutscenees
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Hidden story trees or finicky story trees so you have to meticulously follow guides lest you get a bad end or miss a secret ending
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Weapons that break.
No. Never. Stop doing it.
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Shotguns that only are effective up to 10 ft
What game actually has shotguns act like real shotguns???
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Loading screen ass tunnels or hallways or elevators.
We live in 2025. Evryone has Ssds and there are many ways to load as a player advances. Stop doing this 1990s shit.
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Timers.
Just never find them fun
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Forced heavy backtracking.
I’m not having fun, you’re just wasting my time. Fuck you.
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Unrelated puzzle mini games
Please stop adding worthless busy work into games. One of the first mods I added to Cyberpunk was just to remove the stupid breach protocol. It’s not that its hard, it’s not. It’s just time wasting and annoying. Dispatch is another game with these for no reason. Fallout, Bioshock, fucking so many games have this shit.
Either I have the level to pick the fucking lock or I don’t. I don’t want to play some half assed unrealistic lockpicking sim for the equivalent of an hour by the time the game is done. It’s like making you have to take each step for you’re character or breathe. Not the point.
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Obviously all mtxs, goes without saying and marketting dark patterns like everything here.
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Nerfing “”“OP”“” things in single player power fantasy games.
Are you high? That’s the fucking point!
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Chance based loot.
Just no. I don’t want to reload a dozen times to get the thing I want. It arguably exists in the world and I should just be able to go find it.
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Loot.
Stop spreading this shit around making me have to waste time everywhere I go in order to be remotely optimally equipped.
Just say no to loot.
Healing should be 9n a cool down and have upgrades availible like in cyberpunk, Ammunition should be on enemies, cooldown or purchased
Weapons if loot able should be placed identically with no luck elements, or in exactly the stores they should be in.
The shotgun one makes sense because if they were real world accurate it would be the only useful gun in most games.
Yup, shotguns would literally be the only weapon anyone used. In World War 2, Germany tried to sue America for war crimes, because American trench guns were too effective. Germany was getting devastated in the trenches, purely because a few dudes with shotguns could mow down an entire platoon once they made it into the enemy trenches.
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How about the release broken game then finish the game way after release… if you’re lucky mechanic?
Gamers and investors both incentivize this unfortunately and apparently regulators are cool with straight up fraud too.
Ill never forgive no man’s sky, no matter how much they fixed it after.
They were openly fraudulent and got away with it.
Unchangeable difficulty settings. Worse, games that offer you to lower it and don’t warn you that they’re going to lock it at the lower setting. Resident Evil Village did that to me. Last time I posted about this someone said it warms you, so I guess they changed it.
Permanently loosing a treasure that you can only get once because your pocket is full.
Or even worse, reading online that there’s some super special item you could have gotten 20 hours into the game if only you didn’t open that one regular chest in the starting area in the first 5 minutes of the game. I forgot which Final Fantasy did this? 9 maybe? Pissed me off to no end, i’m not playing through everything again for this… just seemed mean spirited.
More generally, when decisions early on influnce later stuff that you have no way of knowing about yet. I’m not going to play your game 50 times to see all options. So either i play with the wiki open to not miss anything, ruining the fun, or i realize later on that i could have gotten something but it’s now forever locked because of earlier decisions, pissing me off.
Baldurs Gate 3 had a lot of that…
