Ask Lemmy

Ah another one - Forced stealth sections where you can't be detected at all. Especially in a game where stealth is optional or not even a thing you can really do normally.

Exponentially growing requirements that out pace rewards. I don't want to spend 10 hours grinding just to level up.

INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE

Lootboxes

Time limits / countdowns.

Grinding and no rewards. Feeling underpowered and dying all the time, unable to progress with loot alone.

Looking at you, Path of Exile.

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.

Sports games pretty much stopped progressing entirely when the "ultimate team" cancer spread.

Doom3 flashlight. It’s Doom. Not fucking 5 Nights at Freddy’s.

Quick time events.

Carry weight.

Hiding content in New Game Plus. Making me play a game twice just to artificially ass replay "value."

Taking control away from the player for stupid bullshit.

Dragon's Dogma 2 had this to the most extreme level I had ever seen. Random NPCs can initiate dialogue without you hitting a prompt (and they can appear anywhere, even in the middle of a cave full of monsters). Your companions will sometimes high five you, and it just forces you into an animation that it didn't prompt you for. There is an actual boss fight in the game that is literally a cutscene of someone else fighting it.

Dragon's Dogma? More like Dragon's Dogshit. 😬

The skulls in MGSV.

"Let's put almost unkillable, magic zombies that chase you into this stealth game. Also, make them unavoidable"

Been playing Dark Deity (a Fire Emblem clone) lately and instead of permadeath, it reduces a random stat by 10% permanently. Can't say I'm a fan. Just have a permadeath mode and a regular mode.

Alien pods getting a free move as soon as you uncover them

Escort missions

I'll mention God of War and its final battle. You spend the entire game building skill with one set of weapons, then the end of the game pushes a brand new set of moves on you. I never did finish the game because of that BS.

Underwater swimming on a game that wasn't built around it. Every single time it's a frustrating battle with poor camera angles and imprecise controls.

Oh I'm above the thing I need to collect but slightly out of grabbing range, all I need to do is go straight down... And now I'm 20ft away.

Games that have long scripted sections you can't skip and sometimes even save. Next level, you'll have to move around and answer questions so can't even go take a shit.

Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk both had sections like that. Loved the games, hated that bullshit.

Achievements.

I want to enjoy the game, not artificial milestones for bragging rights.

Often it's climbing.

I'm looking at you, breath of the wild.

A multiplayer game that pits you against lousy AI bots with human looking names for your first "games' so you feel like you know how to play and makes the game seem fair and fun.

Then after you're comfortable, you get pitted against a lobby of 12-year-olds who haven't seen daylight since birth who annihilate you and curse you out on coms.

Deliberately ableist bullshit. Like no pause or an over reliance on quick time events.

Not the worst, but I'm annoyed by invisible walls. Just give me a reason why I can't be there.

Missable or multiplayer-only achievements. Or the ones that force you to replay the game.

Ghost of Yōtei is doing it well. Everything is available at all times after the main story is completed in a single game. I could think of a few possible achievements they could have created that would be missable but I'm glad they didn't.

GTA5 has a lot of multiplayer achievements I could never get because I hate GTA Online.

Talos Principle 2 has at least two achievement that each needs a replay to the end and you have to follow a specific path of talking to characters that you don't know upfront if you're not looking online for it. So if you're trying this without a guide you might end up replaying it more than twice. That's shitty.

press ▲ to jump. shit button. it's x.

Holding a button to do anything/everything. I can see the logic of where it may be useful, but it doesn't need to be used for everything. So damn annoying.

*Oh, and similarly, forcing excessive submenus to do basic things, like continue a save from the main menu. That should be one, maybe two button presses, not 4+ along with a confirmation. I'll never understand games with stuff like that.

Progression systems that draw attention away from the core gameplay loop

Examples are season passes, archivements, minigames that took longer too complete then the main game

Souls. The clumsy roll and artificial difficulty spikes and losing all your shit because you didn’t do it all “just right” for the entire encounter.

Ugh.

EDIT: Honorable mention . . . Timers. I’m looking at you, current Bungie.