Remove a Game Mechanic from Existence

[eclipsed_chemistry]

I want to say "fetch quests" but a few of them are necessary in games. Ditto on "go here kill X" quests. If I could eliminate, say, most of the former but not all?

No no no I got it. Fucking escort missions when the person you're escorting is unarmed and can't defend themselves. FUCK escort missions because they never come in the form of "oh here's our extremely important person, better send a few tanks and very highly trained personnel to guard them" even when you could very fucking easily do that. Instead, it's all "oh lol it's the president better send our one soldier to get him from his prison in Moscow to Beijing trololololol." A few times the person has a gun or something and it's not so bad but overall, escort missions are so awfully done that they should not exist. So escort missions. Fuck them. hard. With a tree.

This lol. This this this. I hate fucking escort missions, especially in games where there are LONG sections of doing nothing and if you die you have to start from the very beginning and do nothing for minutes at a time all over again. Or if it has a long, unskippable cutscene before it to make it that much worse.

 

[kinapuffar]

Quick-knifing: selfexplanatory.

Pallette-swaps: same enemies, different colour, lazy.

Copy-paste dungeons: we're not paying $60 per game so devs can fuck around and do 1/10th of the work and then just make us play it 10 times. Fuck that.

Back-tracking: sort of the same as above. Instead of being creative and making some new environments, don't make us go through the same ones backwards, it's just frustrating, it makes the game suck.

Padding the games: if your game is too short, don't try to make it longer by giving all the enemies a whole bunch of extra health, and decreasing the amount of damage our weapons do so we'll be stuck forever killing hoards of expendable goons by smacking our nerfbats against their diamond armour. Extra asshole points if you on top of this decrease the amount of experience or items they give off, to force us to grind every single one of them in order to advance.

I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy XIII. You bastard.

 

[boyvirgo666]

any insta kill enemies(ie the grim reaper or the dwarf priests in magicka). oh and when the screen gets all fuzzy when you take alot of damage

 

[eclipsed_chemistry]

Another few:

Backtracking through identical levels. Going through the same environments as a different character or with different enemies might be OK, but as the same character with the same enemies? No.

But what about difficult RPG's that pretty much require you to power level to make your life easier? I mean, one could argue that the games shouldn't be that hard in the first place, but I like my JRPG conventions. But if you're talking about the Metroid style, backtracking-just-to-get-that-one-treasure-you-missed-earlier kind of backtracking, then yeah, screw that, it can die in hell for all I care.

Minimal checkpoints. We shouldn't have to fight the same easy battle 500 times in a row because there's no checkpoint between it and the hard-as-all-fuck boss that comes next.

Difficulty levels distinguished by increased enemy health/damage or increased prices on upgrades/gear. Hardcore mode should have smarter enemies with better accuracy, or introduce tougher enemy types rather than make everything just hit you harder and have more health. Same with just decreasing your health.

I wouldn't play Demon's Souls anytime soon if I were you lol.

 

[Raykuza]

Infinitely respawning enemies (in linear games) - How are we supposed to know when/how to progress if the enemies just keep on coming? I have wasted so much time wondering if I'm supposed to go.

QTEs - These are boring and outdated. When I heard Need for Speed would have foot chasing sequences I got pretty excited... And then I saw one. Such disappointment.

Water levels - These are the worst. Water is just the biggest, most awful hazard in all of gaming, made especially terrible by the fact that you can't swing a sword at it and kill it. If you can go under the water, the physics change, you can't stay under for lack of air, and sometimes visibility is decreased. If you can't go under the water, thats just large chunks of the level that are restricted, usually under the threat of instant death. Fuck water.

 

[Kurokasumi]

I would remove regenerating health in a heartbeat. Make gaming challenging again.
Remove aim assist in FPS's. Iron sights are already all the assistance you need.
And finally, get rid of that shit in fighters now where you have "simple controls" AKA: Auto combo-ing. Defeats the purpose of fighting games.

 

[Woodsey]

Not so much a mechanic as a feature: don't wrestle control from me to show me something. Learn how to design levels so that I am inevitably drawn to it. I do not need a fucking "look" button.

 

[Ninjat_126]

Minimal checkpoints. We shouldn't have to fight the same easy battle 500 times in a row because there's no checkpoint between it and the hard-as-all-fuck boss that comes next.

Difficulty levels distinguished by increased enemy health/damage or increased prices on upgrades/gear. Hardcore mode should have smarter enemies with better accuracy, or introduce tougher enemy types rather than make everything just hit you harder and have more health. Same with just decreasing your health.

I wouldn't play Demon's Souls anytime soon if I were you lol.

I'm going to buy it anyway. I need something nonimportant to rage over.

 

[Zenhurak]

Just for funsies I think it would be interesting to see if Plot Armour never existed.

 

[Wintermoot]

the two weapon system it,s bullshit and makes the gama less fun.
inb4 QTE,s
they work in Shenmue

 

[teebeeohh]

2 weapons system, and i would like my health bar back. I don't mind regenerating health as much as i miss a health bar. Smearing jam on the screen or graying out the screen is not the same as having a nice little bar that tells me i am 75% dead.

 

[KaizokuouHasu]

Regenerating health. Of all the game mechanics the one I have the most problem with is the one that encourages me to hide until all my injuries are somehow magically auto-healed. ¬_¬

 

[Crazy Zaul]

Friendly AI who have an IQ of -1000 like they do in basically every game ever made that has a team of you and 3 other guys.

 

[Vykrel]

i would remove quick-time events (aside from the occasional "Tap A" scenario). other than that, they are simply a nuisance, and depending on how unforgiving they are, they can be downright infuriating.


but to everyone complaining about regenerating health, you guys would be complaining even more if started dying 10 times as often. also, i think a game like CoD 4 would be completely impossible to beat on Veteran if the player didnt have regenerating health. just saying

 

[Nanaki316]

WATER FUCKING LEVELS

A thousand times this. For some reason, I get scared doing anything underwater. It completely puts me off a game and freaks me out.

 

[CRRPGMykael]

funny how James Bond 007:Blood Stone managed to put all of the stuff you complained about and made it into a game:
Regenerating health(although if you're playing on max difficulty it will hardly matter as 1 shot has a 90% chance to kill you)
Forced stealth parts(but this IS 007,and the stealth is more important,so you could call it a stealth game with forced action parts)
Vehicle sections(again,done pretty well)
QTE(not totally sure it has any,but as i recall,there are a bunch)
Cover-based shooting(also executed pretty well)
Two-weapon system(yes,yet again I've never felt like complaining about it,so that means it's OK)
A Turret section(Fuck,THIS ONE I HATE)
Assisted Aiming(but this feature is only avaible ala Splinter Cell:Conviction style,meaning you have to do a bunch of melee kills before you get to enjoy it)
And more stuff that would usually annoy you,but I can't recall anymore right now...


And you know what the best part is?That game was great...just sayin'...


Staying on topic:TURRET SECTIONS.THEY ARE HORRIBLE.EVERYBODY HATES THEM.THEY'RE LIKE THIS THING THAT...uh,long story short:Fuck turret sections.

 

[SpaceBat]

Either QTE's or underwater levels.
QTE's because the mechanic basically consists of pressing a button on time and watching stuff happen on screen. I can live with the Heavy Rain kind of QTE, but I absolutely despise the Bayonetta kind of QTE's. You know, the ones that come out of nowhere and send you to the game over screen just because you didn't pay a lot of attention to the shitty cutscenes. Underwater levels because they simply don't work very well. I honestly can't think of a single 3-D free-roam underwater level that worked perfectly. It's usually the worst part of a game.

Escort missions as well, I suppose. Mainly because these guys usually can't defend themselves, but this isn't as bad as the above two.

 

[Richardplex]

None. I like them all. It's just sometimes, hell, a lot of the time, they are misused and overused. The one that I've not seen done well at all is the moral choice system. For example, in InFamous

Spoiler

I don't want to be told that saving trisha was bad karma

the universe doesn't say Rule Utilitarianism is the only correct ethical theory of right and wrong and Karma of the universe follows it, no video games industry, you have not solved ethics, what is right and wrong is still in debate, if you cared so much about about telling me what right and wrong fundamentally is, why does killing thousands and thousands of people I disagree with have no ramifications on my karma? aaaaaargh.

...okay, maybe I don't like them all. I'd say Mass Effect almost did it right with paragon and renegade instead of good and bad, but it limits my conversation if I don't go full one way or the other. Just because I'm nice to some parties and hateful to other parties does not mean I'm less nice and less hateful to the respective groups. If it was implemented as reputation-per-group based instead of overall flowers or bile to everyone, maybe my first two sentences would be closer to the truth.

 

[Domehammer]

I would remove mechanic for invisible walls that lock you into a area and face is pressed against window by a crazy person going hey look at that stuff we did. Don't mind any positive thing you liked about it might be ruined because were forcing you to see it.

 

[bliebblob]

Didn't read all posts yet so I hope I'm first on this.

Chance of failure when enchanting/crafting in mmorpg's.

This is one of the many things WoW got right: if you got the ingredients you get the cake. No nasty surprises. (maybe other mmo's already did this before WoW idunno)
It's sooo frustrating when you get all 26 thingamajigs needed to make your offhand dagger a little stronger and than the game goes "woops it phailed and all 26 of em are gone. Off you go to find 26 more trololololo."
Koreans made this even worse: the items you need to upgrade gear cost real $. And if the enchant fails you not only lose the item you paid for but there is a chance your sword (or whatever) actually becomes weaker or disappears alltogether (including any other enchantments you already put on it). Stories of people who shelled out 30 bucks and got absolutely nothing to show for it are not rare. Obvious cash grabbing much?

Captcha: revenged ntecurtm. Do I have a dirty mind or does that last part kinda sound like... I mean all the letters are there...