Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

Not a mechanic i guess, but motion blur

Escort missions. Specifically when the person you are escorting is as sharp as a bag of hammers.

Microtransactions - the answer always has been and always will be microtransactions.

Pay to win.

Unskippable intro levels that teach the control mechanics.

Permanently loosing a treasure that you can only get once because your pocket is full.

QTE, especially when they're randomly inserted into an otherwise action/skill based game.

Very few checkpoints or save options. I don’t have time to try to beat something if there is like 20 mins of playtime from the last checkpoint.

Where one enemy sees you and now all their friends somehow knows where you are

Something that hasn't been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay...

Case in point, unmodded Skyrim's legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation'd...)

• Games with designated save points only.
• Skill/Tech trees that really only have one viable path.
• Games that reward stealth until the boss battle.

Stat/EXP loss on death.

Unskippable cut scenes, especially before a boss. I want to play on hard difficulty, which means I WILL die to bosses. Do not force me to watch that shit 5+ times or I'm out like trout.

Timer that can be skipped with paid currency.

Probably encumberance, almost certainly the single most ignored rule in rpgs.

But honorable mention goes to old school AC/THAC0 - the mechanics were originally for modern-era battleship game where armor class referred to size. Using the smallness of boats to model the defensive power of better armor was never going to produce sensible results. THAC0 was always unweildy at the table, slowed play, and turned combat into a chorus of "uggghhhh does a 13 hit?" "Ugh.... no."

The worst game mechanic is artificial difficulty where enemies aren't challenging. Instead, they are just damage sponges.

I don't think that I can give the worst, but I can give some that I did not enjoy.

• Invisible teleporters. Some old RPGs

like the D&D Gold Box games

came without an auto-mapping feature. Part of the game was, as one played along, manually creating a map on graph paper. This in-and-of-itself was somewhat time-consuming, and if one made a mistake or got turned around, it could be hard to fix one's map. A particularly obnoxious feature to complicate this was that sometimes, there'd be unmarked teleporters to move you to another place on the map without notice, and you had to figure out that this had happened. Very annoying. I didn't like this mechanic.

• Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature. Some strategy games do this. The idea here is to force you to think in real time, and not permit you to just pause and think about things. Problem is, even if one agrees with this, in the real world, sometimes you need to answer the door or use the toilet. Not a good idea.

• In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one's precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There's some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don't think that it's necessary

a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don't really like situations where it's just added for the sake of being there.

2 sets of teeth, the first only lasting 1/9 of your life and the second being 8/9. 2/9, 7/9 would be much better or just 2/9, 4/9, 6/9.

Oh, hair falling out and all your joints hurting for 5/9 of your life kinda blows as well.

Both Control and the dogshit Avengers game had these upgrade systems where you were constantly bombarded with pickups that offered inane benefits like “2.5% increase to headshot damage for 3 seconds after taking damage while in midair” and you spent half the game managing your goddamn upgrades and the limited upgrade slots instead of having fun. It got to the point where I was relieved when I DIDN’T get any upgrades after a battle.

Loot boxes

For me: weapon durability.

Anything that is 100% chance and just wasting time, with no meaningful way for the player to influence the odds. For example, how fishing is implemented in some MMOs like ESO: you can eat a buff food and use the correct bait for the water, but beyond that you're just waiting in agony until the random timer dings. Then you do that 12 times before moving to the next hole, etc. "Waiting" isn't an enjoyable mechanic.

Relationship mechanics. If I give someone a pumpkin twice a week, they’re just going to be confused and pissed.

When you can't dodge because you're charging an attack/doing a combo/whatever. If I'm attacking one enemy, and I see another one about to attack me from behind, I want to be able to get out of the way, not be stuck in an attack animation until I get hit

Not really a game mechanic, but as an achievement hunter I freakin' HATE speedrun-achievements. The longer the game, the worse it is

QTE, including those i have to align those bar that goes left and right, or those tap a button quickly, in any game that isn't point and click adventure game. It's not fun in God of War, and it's not fun in Dying Light.

Also extreme hand-holding tutorial that force you to click button or do certain action else your progression is refused. This happened a lot in mobile game, which i basically refuse to play.

Grinding.

When the game progresses naturally, and as you move through the game, you always find yourself in the right spot to overcome the next obstacle, that's great. But the second I have to stop progressing through the game and go spend 6 hours killing goblins, I'm done.

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.

All the ones gacha games employ: daily stamina, grind to get some currency, power creep the characters, create content that can only be cleared with premium characters etc.

Stealth challenges on games that don't have stealth as a regular mechanic

Anything that makes you follow an npc that doesn't match speed with the fucking player

Anything pay to play ruins it for me.

The outright scams and marketting dark patterns.

Outside of this, I hate when you have levelled up a character immensely to the point where an errant sneeze could wipe out half a city, and then you flick a boss to defeat their lineage then lose in the cutscene.

I know the reasons why this is done, but I would vastly prefer shorter but more fleshed out game experiences.

A shorter story that is actually repayable naturally where you can do so many things and there are not cutscene losses.

Speaking of which, things like

I don't want to have to read some guide to know that a a piece of content I really value will exist.

Its not fun to me to have notable portions of a game cut out such that you have to be a wiki reader.

These combined would make a game with a more stress free experience where you can truly just experience the world and not be too fussed about if you stuffed up a certain ending tree etc.

Games with inventories where they treat a single gem or a flower petal as occupying the same space in your rucksack as a pair of boots.

Guys, we go back to Ultima 7 with the key ring, the problem was solved along fucking time ago. Stop being lazy and have gem sacks, crafting bags, keyrings, etc for small items.

Probably the Enemy Boxer from Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. Canonically he is a mechanic but they don’t even give him the wrench ability which isn’t even that special of an ability, and then he dies like a wimp with his plastic still-alive head getting chopped off by the plane that he’s supposed to be repairing. An idiot who would punch an anvil three times in a row deserves that sort of graceless demise.

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Time gates. Gacha games are rife with them...

Want a piece of equipment for your character? Well spend daily currency to get one that regenerates over a day. Oops rng God hates you and you got +Def for a character that wants +Atk, better luck tomorrow/next week... Oops it's still not your week +Hp this time.