The other thread about favorite mechanics is great, so let’s also do the opposite: what are some of your most hated mechanics?
Unrepairable weapons are the worst thing. There’s nothing worse than finding a super cool, rare weapon and being paranoid about it breaking.
That’s one of the big things that bothered my in Breath of the Wild. I wanted to go to this cool looking location and find something neat, but I knew that I’ll either get a weapon that breaks in 5 hits, a seed, or an orb. Really deflated my sense of exploration when I realized this was the gameplay loop.
Radiant quests. You can never complete the game because of this, the quests are generic and repetitive and offer nothing but “stretch the playtime”.
That and mechanics like “rando dragon attacks in Skyrim” and “City is under attack” from Fallout 4. I quit F4 because I was on my way to a mission and got the "city under attack notification, and on my way to defend another city was under attack.
To yes-and this: procedural content in general. No Man’s Sky is a snore-fest for me, big, empty, meaningless. Missions in Elite Dangerous and X4 are similarly pretty boring, though the former is more fun the first time around. There has to feel like there’s some world-affecting point to what you’re doing. IMO
Pretty much a lot of procedural “content”. I guarantee big publishers will capitalize on all of this AI to replace writers with generated stories/quests/etc. No idea what to make of this.
I would disagree, some of my favorite games are procedurally generated.
Factorio, RimWorld or valheim for example.
Oh totally. I didn’t mean to imply “all procedural content = bad”. Terraria comes to mind and is one of my favorite game of all time. The “world” is procedural when created, but there are “key” areas/objectives that don’t change. I’m thinking more along the lines of Fallout 4’s “radiant” junk that big publishers salivate over because mountains of endless+cheap content = ($o$)
Pay 2 win and excessive abuse of FOMO.
E.g. for the next two weeks you can purchase/grind for [character] with a LIMITED EDITION green hat!
It would be OK if such thing was behind an achievement and allowed to be gained later.
Some companies have gotten a little sneaky with it, like Microsoft with age of empires. They make their newly released DLC civs overpowered for two months then nerf it every time.
Escort quests. Stealth sections in games that aren’t built around stealth would be close second.
Game timers. I want to screw around on my time. The more time-based a game becomes, the less I enjoy it.
