Outdated game mechanics that you don't like to see in modern games?

Are there any outdated game mechanics that you think don't belong in modern games? Here's what I believe.

• Limited lives and continues that cause you to have to replay the entire game or stage just by screwing up too many times.
• Having to reload your weapon, especially if you already have an unlimited amount of ammo to begin with.
• Loading screens. We live in an age where loading screens can easily be replaced with background loading. A lot of games do this, but some still use loading screens.
• Unskippable cutscenes. The game doesn't care if you've already played the game like twenty times. It demands that you watch the Great Deku Tree tell the Triforce story again.
• 8-Bit and 16-Bit looking graphics. Some modern games still use this design scheme, when it's very outdated and would prefer a much more modern design choice, like smooth animated artwork or models. I believe all games in this style should use vector graphics.

honestly, in a lot of cases, boss fights. Certainly we want to see an exciting sequence of events culminate in the perfect finale, but that doesn't always mean some oversize monstrosity with too much health. I get that in the early days of gaming size and health were the only real ways to differentiate a significant enemy from the rest from a gameplay standpoint. That's not true today, and yet we get plenty of games that march out the same NES style boss mechanics.

Now, games like Bayonetta and Shadow of the Colossus were brilliant because the gameplay accommodated these oversize boss battles. Even Dragon's Dogma allows you to scale up large enemies and stab them in the chest or wreak havoc on the back of their skulls....but then you have just about everything else whether it's DMC or Dark Souls where you're just sitting there slashing at the enemy's foot like some insane pedicurist. Even some games that are brilliant throughout like Uncharted 2 march out some ridiculous bullet sponge at the end, not because anything in the gameplay or narrative required it but because tradition did. Devs need to stop worrying about what programmers with many more limitations than they did to create a climax and start considering the actual game they're making...sometimes you don't even need a boss - take Halo's intense hog race through an exploding ship or Prince of Persia's mad ascent up palace towers with no sands to help you if you mess up.

I always found games like MDK where you just straffed in circles much more fun than the wall cover games Gears Of War popularized.

I agree. Sometimes it makes sense - but the times I feel least annoyed by "bosses" is when they are a more natural part of the scenery and less bullet-sponge "epic moment in the game" design. The WORST part of TLOU was fighting whatshishead in the burning building towards the end. It was immersion breaking, felt out of place, and was just dumb. It could have been handled better

I can agree with those except for 8/16 bit visuals, and reloading.

We are seeing a lot of really cool art done with 8 and 16 bit visuals. Ever play Hyper Light Drifter? That game is incredible. Or Factorio? Not sure if that counts (it might be 32? I dont know...) but it is very retro but very cool.

And reloading I think is necessary, adds challenge, doubt, and diversity. I hate just holding down the trigger with no consequences.

As for my personal grievances, well, you pretty much nailed them.

Personally though I'd like to see some older mechanics come back; health regen is the worst, and I'd love to see health packs make a comeback.

Assisting or fixed camera angles. Super Mario 3D World was a great game, but not being able to feel the level around me while moving, and through his perspective, is something that I want corrected.

Agree with most of your choices. But TBH the things I don't like to see in new games were popularized recently,,, like QTEs or Detective vision. Yes I know these features were present in some old games too but they are now pretty much standard in almost half of the AAA games, if not in most of them.

I can't stand the 8-bit/16-bit graphics...lazy indie developers. I hate indie games and how they clutter the online stores.
Always-online is getting pretty old, especially if you're playing single player.
Characters talking to themselves, like shut the hell up and let me explore the environment and figure things out on my own. I don't need your input Nate.

Reloading your weapon is outdated? I've been playing the original Doom, and the fact that you don't reload is my least favorite part of the game. It's so satisfying.

For my outdated mechanics, I'd go with crafting mechanics in games where that isn't the focus. In fact, I'd say bloat like that in general, where you have to get piece of junk X and scrap metal Y and element Z to do something that should not be that needlessly difficult. All I can think of during crafting elements of a game is "someone spent time and money putting this time-suck in the game instead of making the game more fun".

Personally love when modern games use 16-Bit graphics, it's just a style that I can't imagine looking aged. But yeah the limited lives are something that should be taken out of games almost entirely, can't really see the point of them.

Call of Duty.

Quest markers. The first game I recall playing that had this feature is Oblivion, and, while it did solve an onerous problem from Morrowind, where it could be difficult to find where you must go to continue a quest because of a simple map and vague and ambiguous directions from NPCs, it also made exploration and player participation in questing mindlessly trivial. Now, it seems like all modern RPGs and MMOs have an abundance of quest markers for fear that some player will stop playing because he couldn't figure out after more than a minute where to go next. It's not enough to tick a box in the options menu to remove them either, since it's often the case that the entire quest structure assumes the quest markers will show you the way, and without them, you're not given the requisite knowledge to figure it out on your own. It's streamlining run amok for the sake of accessibility.

Multiplayer level progression (such as in Call of Duty, Battlefield, and League of Legends). If a game's multiplayer isn't good enough to merit my attention for long, locking out weapons, upgrades, and characters behind a superficial progression system won't do it either. It's a cheap, manipulative way to keep people playing a game much longer than they normally would have while punishing players who don't have the same amount of time to potentially get the same experience as the hardcore players. I create my own kind of progression by setting goals I, not the game, want to aspire to achieve. Don't hold me back because you want to win my precious time.

Story-telling through audio playback. This was done well in Bioshock, but when every other modern open-world game seems to do the same thing, it comes across as contrived. How many people do you know in real life who record audio diaries? And why would they be scattered all over the place? It's a lazy method to fill in the holes in a plot or character. Just because it's somewhat believably explained in, say, Watch_Dogs and the Division because cell phone calls get recorded without consent, doesn't make it any less forced, disjointed, and out of place in the grand narrative.

Daily and weekly quests. A quick way to kill whatever joy there is to do in a game by giving players excuses to log into a game or inhibit progress behind rewards that are arbitrarily limited by quest lockouts. Make these rewards actually rewarding to get, rather than another chore among many others.

I don't know if this is a game mechanic or not for sure, but I really hate the way most RPG's allocate the use of magic. I love to play mages/magic users in RPG's but many RPG games now barely let you use your magic. It's like, I work really hard leveling up to get these great spells and then I can barely use 4 of them. I don't understand the point of that? Just because I got a cool new high damage spell, it doesn't mean I don't want to easily access my low level spell that uses waaaay less mana/magic on a simple foe along the way to a boss. I also feel the short time limits for mage armor spells is annoying. Not a big deal if the game allows us to also wear physical armor too that doesn't suck lol. I agree about the 8-16 bit graphics. I'm a huge graphics person and it's funny because my kids love Mine craft and that's ok, but I am 35, and I grew up with Atari and Nintendo and I laugh because I am ready to move on to real graphics and the kids toys look like blurry blocks from back in the day and they love it lololol. I'm not sick of bosses at all. I love boss battles, but what I don't like is gimmicky bosses. It's just like with the spells. We spend hours and hours leveling up or getting good weapons and such and then the boss is immune to everything and there is always some indirect gimmick you have to do to beat them. It's like, ugh, really? Go here hit the gong, smack boss, come back wait till it throws minions, kill minions, smack gong, hit boss. Blah. Why can't I just use my awesome spells and annihilate it?

I don't see it often, but unlimited enemy spawns. I remember playing Call of Duty: World at War and just sitting there picking away at enemies for a good 15 minutes before finally realizing that they were just going to keep spawning and that I'd have to push myself forward despite there being enemies present.

Quick time events.

@chad_devore: I agree with a lot of the stuff in your list but weapon reloading is part of the action and adds in an extra sense of damage.

The guys here have alreday mentioned my pet peeves that could easily be removed, i.e. unnecessary boss fights, re-spawning enemies in games like COD.

A major old game problem that needs to be removed is invisible walls. With modern day technology and the size of developers employing hundreds of staff, surely someone can come up with a better way than just invisible walls.

Hackneyed Difficulty Modes. Going to the trouble of including multiple difficulty levels should mean more than bumping up the health and damage of your enemies, throwing in more enemies for you to deal with, limiting your number of lives, or designing AI to cheat to give you a profound disadvantage. Give me more objectives, fewer resources, new enemies and game mechanics--whatever is necessary to challenge my skills and knowledge of the game other than adjusting a couple of stats and labeling it more difficult.

Unlockable Difficulty Modes. Don't force me to play the easier difficulties in order to unlock the most difficult ones. If I had completed the game in the past and lose the save file, I shouldn't have to play through it all over again to play the most challenging modes. I'm looking at you Ninja Gaiden Black and Metriod Prime 3.

Ridiculous Survival Mechanics. It's not fun to be on the verge of death by starvation, dehydration, and illness every few minutes.

Extreme Randomness in Crafting. I shouldn't need to craft dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of items because the crafting results are random. Everyone knows that wherever it's incorporated in a game, it's to serve as mundane resource- and time-sinks.

Rubberbanding AI in Racing Games. No explanation is necessary.

Limited game saves. As in, mandatory check points/save stations, combined with a lack of ability to manually save one's progress at any time. That does nothing but waste my time, forcing me to replay parts of the game that I already played.

grinding: grinding is basically the developer saying "look...we have few ideas and little content..so were just going to stretch it out by having you kille the same enemies and do the same things over and over...and over..and over and overandoverandover..and over again. er..enjoy". it was a staple of older MMOs especially. create a character..go to an area and keep killing things until you reach level X. then move to a new area and do it over again. blech...horrid.

time limits: no. just no. especially on the overall game. complete the game in X minutes or die? yeah...no. its a lazy way to add challenge.

lives: it made sense for the arcades but in modern gaming it makes no sense.

cant think of much else. to be honest gaming has picked up more bad habbits from newer games than it has from older games.

Well honestly, quest markers are a godsend to me, because after playing FFXI and not knowing where to go and then playing FFXIV and having markers made FFXIV that much more fun to me. I get the fact that exploration takes a hit, but wandering around - and many times in the wrong direction - makes a time sink game that much more of a time sink.

As for daily and weekly quests, you're dead on. They're designed with the sole purpose of inviting the player to come back. The player comes back because he has something to do, not necessarily because it's something he wants to have fun doing.

Well, I always figured if you don't wanna replay the whole game over.. stop screwing up. No game is so hard that cannot be beat. Saying this is bad is like saying everyone gets a trophy for showing up is a good thing.

The thing is, now you're acting as if being good at video games is an accomplishment that's actually worth something.

Sure, you can say, "stop screwing up and just get better at playing games." And like, there's a LOT of stuff that I'm bad at. I'm bad at fishing, I'm bad at knitting, I'm bad at carpentry. The mere fact that I'm bad at it isn't justification for me to go get good at it. I either have to enjoy doing it, or have a legitimate need to do it. And seeing as how videogames sort of fail in the "legitimate need" category, the fact remains that I am paying my money for enjoyment. Telling me to get better is pointless if getting better requires that I stop enjoying the very thing that I am paying money to enjoy.

@chad_devore: Hmm. As a guy in my 20's none of these seem "outdated" 'maybe pixel graphics', though it depends on the game being made.

I've played plenty of games that give a limited amount of lives. & for the most case it either made sense, or is poorly designed (because they'll throw lives at you like candy, making the lives system pointless). It's a good system when it encourages you to go all out. The digits tell you that you have to bring your A game. & that's not necessarily bad, in fact it's a rewarding feeling when you show the game who's boss :)

Reloading is closer to "modern" than "outdated". Games like Wolfenstein and D00M had no required reloading at all, so you might want to rephrase what you mean. . Reloading is more realistic, it has no other function in shooting mechanics other than to be faithful to actual firearms.

Unskippable cutscenes are annoying. However, not technically outdated. You could skip cutscenes in very old games. So why do so many games do it? Two factors, 1) The game engine needs to render the clip and the in-game engine separately making some games unable to skip certain events 2) The creative team making harsh choices, because they think the story is 'that' important.

& old graphics is the only one that can be technically outdated. None the less it's considerable towards an art-style, if the designers vision is to pay homage to something like Mega-Man? Let them. Sometimes it works.

@Some of the other things I've read have good points but for the most case, it seems more of personal issues. In plenty of games I love boss battles, in fact they're one of my favorite things in gaming. & grinding is also fun depending on the game. I'm a huge Disgaea fan, and other games that keep my gaming sessions busy through the span of a year lol. Still playing Dark Souls III, and probably will in December haha.

So you enjoy losing?