Ask Lemmy

QTE

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.

Invite your friends for "bonus" resources, or even worse, to unlock progression.

If you want to incentivize me to growthhack your product, let's talk dollars, not Mystic Sunshine Gems.

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

Poorly done procedural generation where it's a waste of time to explore. The first Remnant was pretty bad about this, with small setpieces scattered throughout the levels that looked interesting but usually only contained basic enemies and one or two empty pots. Filling out the map was a chore that was almost never worth the effort - almost never because sometimes there was a unique drop hidden in a level just to screw over anyone who got sick of fighting through hundreds of empty buildings and decided to stick to the main path.

MTX for customisation

Survival crafting. I spend my real life days trying to keep up on sheltering and feeding myself. I don’t want to “relax” by punching trees to make a fire to cook a bird I punched to death.

The pervasiveness of this in every game has limited the content I engage with the last 10 or so years. Everyone started chasing that Minecraft money and now it’s Ubi-fied into just about every mainstream title.

I don’t want to forge new weapons. I want to find them in a chest or earn them by killing a boss. I have bounced off of so many games the moment they ask me to learn a system of crafting. Keep that in it’s own genre and stop padding games out with repetitive busy work.

Microtransactions

When someone dies in Mario multiplayer there's a short pause in the gameplay. It really fucks up everyone else's timing.

No natural health/mana regeneration. I hate games where you need potions to survive or are limited in your spell usage just because you do not enough mana which was finished earlier.

Hold w to crawl forward

One of the worst game mechanics ever found in a game was where the enemy got harder as you gained levels. The same enemy. It basically defeated the value of having more levels. I think it was Oblivion ~~Skyrim~~ where I found this, particularly annoying.

Unskippable cutscenes. Escort quests where I have to walk slowly.

Weapon durability

Fishing

Since all the obvious answers have been covered, I'm gonna dig deep on a genre nobody but me even plays anymore anyway.

Character-based asymmetry in versus puzzle games. It's never been remotely balanced, and I don't believe it ever could be.

Suppose I put you in charge of developing a balance patch for Puyo Puyo Fever, Puzzle Bobble 3, Magical Drop, Meteos, etc, you could just name any other puzzle game that has this. What changes would you make? What changes could you even try to make?

If you look at something like a fighting game, characters have large movesets, and every move has a bunch of variables attached: startup, active, recovery, hitstun, damage, meter gain. Which means there's a lot of surface area for developers to adjust and fine-tune until the cast hopefully feels balanced enough. Even if they don't get it right on the first try, they can gather data from players and use that information to figure out what needs to be patched.

Puzzle games have little to no room to even try to do this. So when you try to give character choice a mechanical effect on gameplay, but they only do one thing like a dropset or garbage pattern, there are almost no meaningful buffs or nerfs that can be handed out when it turns out that Void Hole is kinda good and Skeleton T kinda isn't.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix famously tried, and, well, an attempt was made but it ultimately couldn't do all that much. The tiers got shuffled around slightly, but it's still Ken Fighter.

Health scaling as you level. Just ducking lazy.

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.