Game mechanics you absolutely detest

[symphonymarie]

I might be alone on this one, but I had a really hard time with Skyward Sword.
As an extremely uncoordinated individual at best, I was heartbroken that one of my favorite series would punish me so with such awkward (in my opinion) mechanics. I wanted to love it, I wanted to embrace it, but it just never clicked and I still have yet to finish it because of this. I'm close to the end, but the boss fights were just far too difficult for me, even though I knew exactly what I needed to be doing. (Would this issue be considered mechanics or controls? Is there a difference?)

 

[The Enquirer]

I hate sticking to cover. I honestly never saw it as necessary and it just feels like my character is magnetizing to everything.

We were able to use cover long before these sticky cover mechanics by crouching next to a wall.

It annoys me in certain games. Games like Deus Ex: HR did it right because it isn't the central focus. I guess that's what really get's to me. In certain games like Rainbow Six you can actually avoid cover most of the time if you plan things out right. Same with Deus Ex. But when you have to stick to cover... Ugh.

Another one for me is a game that makes the checkpoint right before a long unskippable cutscene. So every time you die, you need to watch it again. I suppose it's an effective way of making someone really hate a certain set of characters though.

Also mandatory stealth sections. Like the crappy kind wherein the game wasn't built around stealth as an aspect.

 

[FPLOON]

Games that require weapon/armor forging. I can't stand having to grind out random drops to get all the rediculous materials just to make one weapon. Hell in KH 1.5 Remix I got to the end of the game and said "FUCK THIS" to synthesis.

That goes double for Kingdom Hearts 2 (or, I guess II.5 at some point) for me... especially when I'm required to collect X amount of a synthesis item before I end up using it all on a bracelet and/or an earring that's basically useless to me at the point I synthesize it...

Also, Jiminy's Journal (in general) in Kingdom Hearts 2... You mean I have to complete that whole shit 100% just to get that "secret ending" in Standard Mode? FUCK THAT! I'm playing on Proud Mode for now on!!

Edit: In a more general game mechanic... uh... instant/unpredictable QTEs?

 

[Setrus]

Turret sections are detestable and boring, mindless violence with no real goal but holding on until the game decides you've gotten enough kills.

ME3 was the worst with this, adding a turret section - all of a sudden - on the earth mission as you're walking about, having your final conversations with your companions, some which you've fought alongside for three games!
The timing of it is just dreadful, and takes you out of the moment as some game-developer decided "Well they have to have some action now or they'll get bored." No I don't! I wanted to talk to Liara!
And who's that soldier shouting at me, Commander Shepard, to mount the turret? HE should do it, bloody lazy git... *grumble*

 

[Granfaloon]

Forced stealth areas and escort missions. The two things I hate most!

 

[Moontouched-Moogle]

I might be alone on this one, but I had a really hard time with Skyward Sword.
As an extremely uncoordinated individual at best, I was heartbroken that one of my favorite series would punish me so with such awkward (in my opinion) mechanics. I wanted to love it, I wanted to embrace it, but it just never clicked and I still have yet to finish it because of this. I'm close to the end, but the boss fights were just far too difficult for me, even though I knew exactly what I needed to be doing. (Would this issue be considered mechanics or controls? Is there a difference?)

It's a mechanics issue that's compounded by a control issue. Basically every useful weapon or item in Skyward Sword is controlled using the WiiMotionPlus mechanics, ignoring the IR Sensor completely for things like pointing at the screen to select/shoot, and when the calibration tends to slip resulting in cursor drift, it makes controlling things accurately a chore and results in constant recalibration. Also, slashing with Link's sword isn't 1:1, instead taking up to a full second to load a prebaked slash animation for one of 8 compass directions that most closely matches your movement. During that one second, the enemy will usually change their guard, meaning your attack is now going in the wrong direction. I actually had better luck most of the time by flailing wildly against mooks instead of trying to aim for the opening in their guard. I would have preferred true, non-laggy 1:1 slashing, even if it wouldn't look as nice as the premade animations. I know the 1:1 can be done, since Link's arm seems to move around in sync when you're just pointing the sword without slashing, and apparently the Miiverse Zelda minigame thing on WiiU has actual 1:1 slashing on it.

I've yet to finish either Twilight Princess(Wii version) or Skyward Sword, but I'd put money on me finishing the former and never touching the latter again.

As for the discussion at large, I'll add my disdain for forced-to-lose boss fights into the mix. Crisis Core is probably the absolute worst offender of this. Not only is the final battle against what seems like THE ENTIRE FUCKING ARMY(instead of maybe 3 dudes with a well-placed shot as seen in other sources) a battle that you're forced to lose by established plotlines, but you don't even get a say in when you lose it. If you suck really bad, you'll just be stuck at 1 HP without dying until the game is done playing the battle out, since it wants to play flashbacks through the ability roulette thing to represent Zack dying or something. The reason they keep you alive though is so that you can have the battle afterward where Zack is so wounded and slow to move or attack that he can't even fend off 3 mooks with guns, regardless of how badly you curb-stomped the rest of the army beforehand. I would have preferred just fighting 3 super-OP(or even invincible) soldiers instead of throwing an infinite army of squishy chumps at me. Would have avoided the sudden competency whiplash.

Kingdom Hearts seems to do this right. When you fight Leon(*cough*Squall*cough*) after first arriving in Traverse Town, you can actually defeat him in battle. Then you get a cutscene where, instead of being knocked out from losing the fight, Sora is shown victorious but passes out anyway from exhaustion, which makes sense. Both arrive at the same conclusion, but the game is nice enough to let you whoop Leon's ass if you're good enough(or ground XP like a madman on the island).

 

[Twinrehz]

Not being able to skip or pause cutscenes. Bonus points if it's right before an incredibly hard portion of the game, forcing you to sit through it every time you fail the gameplay segment.

Great, now I am having war flashbacks to FFX, you can't skip a single cutscene in the entire game, and before every boss there is usually a 2-5 minute long cutscene that you have to sit through every single time you screw up.
Yunalesca is the worst, there are like 4 cutscenes between you and the fight against her and they are soooooo long.

Tales of Vesperia pulls this shit too, before every single boss fight. And what happens when you inevitably lose, because you want a challenge rather than just go down to easy mode and roflstomp him? You need to reload the game. So the game doesn't remember that you went to the boss, and you have to sit through the whole damn cut scene again. You can fast forward the dialogue, but I would much rather have the option to skip the cut scene in its entirety, or better yet, on the game over-screen, let me reload the boss fight! That would have been a dream come true. No wasting time walking in to the boss again, no wasting time on a cut scene that I've seen once already. Believe me, the shocker doesn't get more shocking from watching it several times.

I like puzzles. I'm ok with hidden object "puzzles" if it's in a one area and you know when you've got everything you need. I don't like when you can't progress because you didn't pick up this hidden thing that you had no reason to even know you would need from 4 areas ago.
And of course puzzle operating on moon logic or relying on people acting really stupid to work. Well game I didn't think of your solution and had to use trial and error because your solution doesn't make sense!

Sounds like you'd hate The Longest Journey. OK game, I guess, but what got on my nerves is that things MUST be done in ONE, and precisely ONE particular order to progress the story. I ended up walking back and forth across 16 in-game screens (I counted) in order to do that ONE thing that I didn't know I had to do, to make the story go forward, and be able to do the thing that I had understood that I had to do.

Both of these things strike me as in-game continuity problems, things have to happen as planned, because the game has been programmed like this. You didn't win the boss fight? That's not how the story goes, you'll have to reload and try again. You forgot to do something at some far away place? Too bad, the story won't make sense until you do that.

Back on track, one game mechanic that really bugs me is timed puzzles in what is otherwise a quite relaxing game. Out of nowhere, a timed puzzle drops from the sky, making me all stressed out because I sort of hate doing things more than once. I get angry when I fail at something, and angry words are only the first things to start flying at that point.

 

[Saulkar]

Anything other than varying levels of arcadiness in vehicles simulations. Seriously, I can handle a vehicle acting in an exaggerated fashion (GTA IV, Fuel, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Just Cause 2) as long as it does not explicitly deviate from real life physics.

When vehicles right themselves in midair to allow for a perfect landing where a spectacular roll was expected or land from a high fall without the vehicle bouncing about as its frame and suspension are taxed to the max, I am completely jarred from the experience. GTA V and ARMA III are two that really come to mind.

But, but, Just Cause 2 is not realistic at all *SMACK!* But it covers most of the expected elements of physically simulating a vehicle, just to exaggerated proportions and thus it rests safely on the other side of the uncanny valley of physics.

Scripted losses: These moments often feel contrived more than anything else.

Invisible walls: Somewhat of a mechanic in that it artificially guides your movements. The total lack of them in Halo 2 were one of the reasons I still love that one above its sequels.

 

[Scars Unseen]

Gameplay/cutscenes prior to character creation/face editing. It always pisses me off when I play a new game in ME2, Dragon Age 2, Saints Row 3 or Saints Row 4 that I can't just make my character. Especially bad in ME2 since you have no way to go and change your face if turns out badly without starting over again. Skyrim also had the problem, but you could just create a save right before character creation if you wanted.

QTEs in inappropriate places, such as God of War-esque finishers. I just beat your goddamn monster. Don't make me play a minigame just to finish it off. If I wanted to play Simon, I'd fucking play Simon.

Grinding. I was okay with meaningless filler in my games when I could only afford one a year. Now I have a backlog of games and less tolerance for your lazy bullshit. MMO genre as a whole, I'm looking at you. I'm okay if there are things I can't get without grinding, but don't make the grind a necessity just to get through the game.

 

[Thyunda]

I'm someone who likes it when a game test your skill rather than your patience, its the reason why I haven't finished Pokémon Y yet because the next hurdle to jump is too high and I have to grind my team to get to jumping it and as we all know the grinding slows to crawl once you hit lvl 30+.

Battle Chateau is your friend in this case, as well as the Exp Share (the new mechanics for it are awesome to avoid grinding, or have your new team members catch up to the others). I'm actually surprised you're having trouble with that, as most people say the game is too easy.

I have only really played two Pokémon games in my life. Red and Y. I took forever playing Red and got stuck on various gym bosses and then lost interest and so never completed it. I rushed through Y, stopping here and there to capture random critters I found here and there, but ultimately moved fairly unimpeded toward the Elite Four. In fact, I didn't lose a battle until the Elite Four, where I lost four or five times, got upset for a while, and then re-ordered my six and beat them. I think I had...Madara the...delphox? Is that what it was called? The third-tier fennekin evolution. I had a talonflame named Stalin - I distinctly remember the Fire lady using a talonflame and repeatedly spamming Brave Bird and really pissing me off. I think I had that 'God of Destruction', too, though he was kind of shit. And an ugly two headed thing that never even saw combat.


OT: Omerta: City of Gangsters. The combat is wank. I have sunk so many hours into XCOM: Enemy Unknown and while the relative incompetence of my troops frustrates me, I don't often feel cheated by the mechanic. The bloody gangsters though...one of the early missions has the objective - Deal with the three protection rackets in the district. Because my laptop has issues with even the most basic of graphics, I figured I would do things from the overview and try to beat the game purely through clever economics. I bought, I sold, I operated entirely peacefully and I bought out the three. Things were going great.

And then the game introduced me to a guy named Wolf or Wolfe or something, and he demanded I lead an armed raid into some factory. And of course the most frustrating thing about that game are the melee attackers. With no sense of self preservation and a total of at least three damaging and status-inducing attacks, they just sprint past your cover and beat the everloving shit out of you. Muggers are even worse, they're armed with baseball bats and can inflict Concussion and make it so your men, who already can't shoot for shit, suffer a penalty to their aim. Two unarmed Pickpockets and a Mugger can do some serious damage to your gang, and even the shotgun wielded by your Boss character can't seem to hit worth shit. If they're close enough to hit, they're close enough to rush your position and kill at least one of your men, and at the early stages you have only three. Two, if you've posted a man on Support. One, if you're staging a prison break.

So I guess my complaint is this - Don't offer two paths and then force me to take one. That's just silly. It'd be like if you selected the Economic Campaign in Stronghold 3 and suddenly an invading army popped up and made violent inquiries into your arms production, on threat of death should they be dissatisfied with your output.

 

[kasperbbs]

I hate sticking to cover. I honestly never saw it as necessary and it just feels like my character is magnetizing to everything.

We were able to use cover long before these sticky cover mechanics by crouching next to a wall.

This, i completed wolfenstein without realising that it had that sticky wall thingy and i didn't really miss it.

The thing that i hate the most is obviously QTE's, especially the ones where you have to mash a button as fast as you can, i just don't get it why some games want me to break my keyboard.

 

[Elberik]

extended tutorials.
Red Dead Redemption is, to me, one of the greatest games of all time but I did not like how it basically forced me back to square one when I went to mexico.

I don't like games that hold your hand explaining how you can interact with the world, especially when the controls aren't that innovative. Fallout 3 explaining the VATS made sense because no other game did that. However Assassin's Creed 4 sill giving me pointers on how to parkour around town is ridiculous.

 

[kilenem]

This is mroe game design but why the hell do people keep putting Load points behind cut scenes. I thought it was bad in Black Ops for 2010 and it was still in GTA5 2013.

 

[V da Mighty Taco]

Random mechanics in general. While certain random elements can work well to add variety or a sense of "needing to adapt" to a game (see every Roguelike and Roguelite ever, as well as Minecraft), things like random crits and random bullet spread tend to annoy me greatly, as I usually hate relying on luck rather than one's own capabilities. Funnily enough, I do like Hearthstone. XD

Another good mechanic for the chopping block is black / white morality systems. One of the reasons I don't like the first InFamous (the only one I've played) was how boring the morality system was. Either you went goody-two-shoes or mustache-twirling villain, with the game punishing you if you didn't going all-in one way or another. The fact that all of your best powers were prone to getting you punished for hurting what the game considered to be a good / bad person via collateral damage didn't help matters either. Anyways, if you're going to have a morality system in your game, you need to be willing to flesh it out and essentially omnidirectional, not a one-or-the-other "are you Superman or the Joker" system.

 

[Kotaro]

Stamina meters. As in, the kind you see in free-to-play games. You know, the mechanic that limits how much you can play at once? That is just utter fething bullcrap; if I want to play your game in two-hour marathon bursts, that's my decision. You don't have the right to tell me I can't. On second thought, just put "poorly-implemented free-to-play monetization" here. It can be done well, it just usually isn't.

In fact, I was vaguely interested in the new online Yu-Gi-Oh! thing that Konami has in beta, until I read that it will use a stamina meter. That alone just killed it for me. I'll stick to DevPro, thanks.

 

[Notshauna]

I'll have to go with time limits and mechanics that stifle play. I don't like time limits in games while they do produce higher pressure moments I feel like the cost of freedom is so great that I rarely value it, because it simply forces you to forgo any strategy that's not sufficiently fast (there are a few exceptions namely in raiding in MMOs where if timers didn't exist it'd be difficult to offer a gear check for DPS players). As for the mechanics that harm play it's far harder to describe as it's far more varied (and it's not like these things should never happen rather that they shouldn't happen in excess), but as examples super heavy counter jungling in LoL, the mythical counterspell everything and draw everything blue mage in Magic, forced turret or stealth sections, and really anything that feels like they never considered if this mechanic is somewhat enjoyable to play against.

 

[Poetic Nova]

QTE's and regenerating health need to die off already, both ad nothing to the gameplay and rather looks like lazyness to me. The latter also drains tactics which I absolutely hate.

 

[TerranV]

Games that require weapon/armor forging. I can't stand having to grind out random drops to get all the rediculous materials just to make one weapon. Hell in KH 1.5 Remix I got to the end of the game and said "FUCK THIS" to synthesis.

That goes double for Kingdom Hearts 2 (or, I guess II.5 at some point) for me... especially when I'm required to collect X amount of a synthesis item before I end up using it all on a bracelet and/or an earring that's basically useless to me at the point I synthesize it...

Also, Jiminy's Journal (in general) in Kingdom Hearts 2... You mean I have to complete that whole shit 100% just to get that "secret ending" in Standard Mode? FUCK THAT! I'm playing on Proud Mode for now on!!

Edit: In a more general game mechanic... uh... instant/unpredictable QTEs?

KH 2 didn't bother me that much because all you need to make something was the right synthesis level and recipie. In KH 1.5 they added an extra section of items you MUST create in order to unlock the Ultima Weapon. Furthermore they require you to gather materials from rare monsters that have to be defeated in a specific way just to get a chance at the drop. Needless padding and incredibly frustrating.

 

[chaser5000]

Kill cams: I hate these with a passion, they have no reason to exist, they add nothing to the game yet they are in every game. I would rather just stare at a respawn timer than watch a kill cam.

When games grab the camera to make you look at an explosion or some other set piece while you're playing the game.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Kill cams: I hate these with a passion, they have no reason to exist, they add nothing to the game yet they are in every game. I would rather just stare at a respawn timer than watch a kill cam.

Killcams allow you to learn the game faster so you can figure out the "good" spots faster and git gud faster. Before, there were people that would camp a spot no one knows about for literally a year and just do the same thing every match.