What are some gameplay mechanics that annoy you?

I hate forced stealth. I've been playing Far Cry 4 lately and a few missions have made me rage quite a bit from forcing stealth. I like the game overall, but forced stealth can go to hell.

Obligatory: git gud u filthy casul scrub

Ya forced stealth sucks. It was the final straw for me in Lords of Shadow 2.

I hate not being able to hide bodies in actual stealth games, shooters that have to fast of aiming when aiming down the sights, shooters that have really slow left and right aiming that progressively get faster, sluggish controls, not being able to walk through teamates when they block pathways and the most annoying has to be horrid camera angles and camera that gets stuck against walls.

Bosses who spawn adds. All it does is slow down the inevitable. The boss is going to die, so why annoy the **** out of me during the process?

Forced stealth doesn't bother me that much, but the big problem with it is that a lot of games that cram a stealth section aren't sealth focused games and as a result have a painfully bad stealth mechanic or one that relies mostly on tedious trial and error.

For me, I'm not a fan of regenerating health, bullet sponge games. Games like many FPS titles when there's literally no way to get through the game without absorbing about a thousand bullets over time and the game design compensates by giving you regenerating health, by putting Chicken Pot Pies every 20 feet, or a quicksave that you can abuse in combat. To me, a well designed game should allow a skillful player to navigate the entire game without taking a hit, but unfortunately the FPS genre doesn't lend itself to this well unless the projectiles are slow enough to dodge and that makes for a slow paced FPS game. The only genre that consistently pulls this off is the "spectacle fighter" genre with games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta or the later Castlevania games. Platformers can also pull this off, but it's hard to do with every game type.

-Byshop

Check points and regeneration health save players a lot of time, though, by not dying over and over again every time they step out of cover. I can understand why the skilled players don't want these crutches. I would love to see these as difficulty options, though. If you don't want regeneration and save points every 10 minutes, simply turn them off.

Forced stealth segments suck ass.

Button lag, especially in games where a fraction of a second counts for everything or nothing, like in Ninja Gaiden games. Not only does it need to be significantly improved, but so much that it happens in real time almost the split second you think it. Only then will we truly advance gameplay input to a point that skill level really matters in action games.

As it is, we try to compensate in our minds for the delay, so we can't get an actual real rhythm/feel for the game in any true standard.

@gamerguru100: using a gamepad and not being to interact, jump, or do a lot of other actions while still having control of the camera.

This, this, this. More options to allow the player to play the game the way he wants.

For example, do you want to know one of my beefs? The fact that so many games still use save stations instead of just allowing me to save whenever the hell I want. When developers decide when I should save, there's a very real chance that they're gonna get it wrong. This is what results in the kinds of crap where a save station is placed too far before a difficult segment, thus forcing players to play through easy shit repeatedly every time they want to have a go at the hard part. I absolutely hate that. I mean, if there's a part of the game where you know you're gonna get ambushed in a particularly hard battle, then it really sucks if there are three waves of easy enemies between the hard battle and the last save point. This means that each time you die, you have to go back to the save point and kill those two waves of easy enemies all over again.

STOP DOING THAT. I don't like repetition unless there's a challenge. I'm not getting killed by those two waves of easy enemies, I'm repeatedly getting killed after that. So stop making me have to replay the part where I fight the easy enemies. I already mastered that part, which means that by now making me play that part again is just a CHORE. It's just a mundane task I have to perform in order to get to the part of the game that I am actually interested in. If I already passed that part of the game, then freaking let me skip it so that I don't have to keep doing it over and over again.

However, some people will say, "but that makes the game too easy." To which I respond, "if you think that manually saving is too easy, then just don't save." However, there is a fair point to say that AUTOMATIC saves are sort of bullshit. I'm talking about that "checkpoint" stuff where the game saves your progress automatically without you telling it to. Some gamers don't like that. While I don't like repetition, some gamers LOVE the challenge of making it through a level without dying once. There's no reason why both types of gamers can't play the game the way they like.

My ideal scenario: A combination of automatic checkpoints and the ability to manually save whenever you want. With one key detail: the ability to turn off automatic checkpoints. Gamers who just want to play the game without screwing around with going to the options menu to save? We've got them covered, the automatic checkpoints take care of that. Gamers like me who don't like the developers telling me when we're allowed to save? That's covered too, with the ability to save the game at any point through the main menu. Gamers who like a hardcore challenge? They get their cake as well. They can turn off automatic checkpoints, and opt to not save manually. Everyone's happy. And in keeping with the "options are good" theme, stop having unlockable difficulty settings. If a gamer is so badass that he wants to play the game on the hardest difficulty, then he should be able to attempt that right from the start rather than having to do a complete playthrough before the hardest difficulty gets unlocked.

Spawning on teammates in battlefield 4, sucks because first off all it looks stupid from an artistic point of view, looks also unrealistic and this game supposed to be realistic. Im diggin this game though, some very intence firefights in mp, holy shit they are intence, just got the game yesterday on january sale dirt cheap. Lots of bang for your bucks that's for sure.

I read a PC Gamer article about this recently. They brought up one that I found out today that I despise:

Player character that walks at a different pace than NPC's. Especially if you have to follow them over a long distance. OMG IT'S UNBEARABLE!

My point was that they are necessary in the games they are typically used in to make up for -other- poor game design choices that mean the only way for the player to proceed is to absorb damage. Most linear FPS titles are like this, and it's a crutch for mediocre game design. It's not even the regenerating health that I dislike, but the slew of bad design choices that typcailly accompany it.

-Byshop

And I'm still a little bit annoyed by scavenging. I admit that it's sort of a hard thing to get around, and some games handle it better than others. But there are SO many games where I have to spend a large amount of my time rifling through suitcases, garbage cans, and lockers for shit like money and ammunition.

As much as I loved the game, the Shadow Warrior remake was a pretty big offender here. Partly with the ammunition, but ESPECIALLY with the money. I mean, I can understand that I could MAYBE find perfectly good shotgun shells in a freaking sewer, but what the hell is the deal with the money? I need to look for money in order to buy weapon upgrades (or to buy ammunition if I can't find any bullets or rockets just lying around behind a dumpster), but that always begged the question...who the hell am I buying this shit from? Okay, I can accept that I find a whole bunch of money lying around. I can accept that it's possible to use money to buy weapon upgrades or ammunition. But the thing is...someone still needs to sell it to me. So, what...is there just some invisible weapons vendor following me throughout the entire game? What kind of sense does that make?

But hey, what are they to do? I guess they could go the Final Fantasy route and only let you cash in your money at stores. But even that's stupid as shit. I realize that games require a certain level of suspension of disbelief, but I could never quite get past how in a Final Fantasy game I'd be going through a dungeon slaying monsters on my way to the boss who wants to destroy the world, and right in the middle of that shit I find a vendor who's selling swords and magical items. What the hell kind of sense does it make to run a business in those kinds of locations? Furthermore, is he really gonna be so stingy as to actually make me buy the stuff? I mean, for god's sake, he's in the middle of a dungeon full of monsters. He has the ultimate sword that would let me easily kick all of the monsters' asses. And yet, he still won't sell me the sword because I didn't collect enough gil? Dude, JUST GIVE ME THE SWORD. Then I'll kill all the monsters, as well as the final boss that's about to destroy the kingdom. Whatever you might lose out from giving me the sword is counteracted by not having monsters and demons swarming around your store in the middle of a dungeon.

But I kind of digressed there. I guess my basic point is that I sort of understand that it is kind of hard to get around that kind of shit. Sort of like way back in the day with Doom. Doom guy is carrying around 10 weapons, including really heavy shit like a gatling gun and a rocket launcher, as well as 100 goddamn rockets. Where is he keeping that stuff? Doesn't matter. It's a stupid game so you don't ask. As long as it allows you to kick ass better, I'll allow it.

But then again, stuff like Doom and Shadow Warrior don't have any pretenses of not be dumb as shit. So that kind of makes it okay for those kinds of games. But then there are games that take themselves seriously, like Alien Isolation. Excellent presentation, but has anyone actually looked at how much shit the protagonist is carrying around? A pistol, a flamethrower, a shotgun, a cattle prod, a bolt gun, up to three EMP bombs and pipe bombs, etc. And in addition to that stupid shit, ALSO resorts to the dumb-ass video game cliche where in the future there are no flashlights that can't run for more than a minute without needing the batteries replaced. I can understand all that stuff in a game that doesn't CARE whether or not it's dumb as hell. But then you've got even games taking themselves dead seriously that do the exact same stuff.

But even that's sort of a digression. Sure, those things use broken logic, but my main beef isn't even with the logic. My main beef is on how it actually affects what I do in the game. All of the Bioshock games are a good example. They were all good games that were very well made, but I spent way too much time looking through trash cans for money and bullets. Every time I have to stop the progression of the game in order to search every nook and cranny, it kills the game dead in its tracks. Do you have any idea how much of my gaming time has been spent looking for lockers and trashcans and cash registers? Way too much. And it's sort of bullshit. The sad thing is that I know exactly why that crap is still so prevalent, and I don't see any easy way around it. But can someone please find an easy way around this shit, so that this cliche can go away and I don't have to spend so much of my gaming time looking for stuff? We're STILL largely in that "kill a room full of bad guys and then spend the next three minutes looting all of their corpses for stuff rather than just going on to the next objective" phase. And that kind of sucks. If someone can think of a way to kill this cliche dead, then please do so.

At first, I too thought "wow, this game is totally realistic!" but after playing a while you'll see it differently. You'll soon get tired of hearing again and again "I'm lighting 'em up!" and "they're lighting me up!" and "hurry up and take this med kit and get going".

Also, most of the time the players never play the game as intended. You'll notice that death matches have a time limit of 60 minutes, but the match is over in 10-15 minutes because most players run around like fools to get kills as fast as possible. High leveled players sit up in towers and snipe people all day, support almost never gives you what you need, when you need it like if you run out of ammo or need a health pack.

It's still a very fun game, but realistic it is not.

@gamerguru100: It pisses me of when:

im forced to run everywhere, especially indoors.

cannot holster my weapon

when you play sports game online with better or same team strength as your opponent (FIFA FUT) but he/she still has faster/stronger team than you...WTF lol

The forced stealth sections in Far Cry 4 seemed relatively easy, assuming you're using all the training aids such as the detection meter and minimap.

My main pet peeve is playing turret gunner, aka rail sequences.

forced action sequences during stealth games ;)

the ones in blacklist when you are forced to carry a guy who you can't put down and have no choice but to shoot your way out were excruciating. as were all the other forced combat scenes in that game.

also games that are overly transparent in what's coming next. e.g. a game in which ammo is scarce and then suddenly you find yourself entering what is essentially an ammo dump making it painfully obvious there's going to be some overly long battle against something that can take an eternity to kill coming

You guys are naming some really good ones.

@ristactionjakso, yes, games where opponents can detect bodies but you can't move them are really annoying. This bugged me about all but the later Tenchu games.

@JustPlainLucas, yes spawn adding bosses suck.

@foxhound_fox: Jesus christ, yes. Both in terms of characters that you have to follow as well as characters who follow you. This drove me nuts in escort mission games where the character you have to protect moves as half your speed and has shitty pathfinding. Or all the times in Metro 2033 where you have to follow an NPC to proceed. It's not so bad when you're in a town or safe area and it turns into an Aaron Sorkin-style "walk and walk" cutscene, but when you're out in the open and you're following the character to make progress in the game.

Yornda in Ico was pretty useless, but at least you could grab her by the hand and drag her ass behind you at a decent pace. RE4 was such a breath of fresh air because Ashley moved JUST AS FAST AS LEON. It was the first game I can remember where the escort character wasn't slower than you and was actually smart enough to hit the floor when shit started going down. Unless she was being dragged off, it was actually pretty hard to shoot her by accident.

Silent Hill 4: The Room was one of the worst offenders, because what's-her-butt gets hurt halfway through the game and you have to escort her back through pretty much every area you already have visited (oh yeah, backtracking sucks too) while she gimps along behind you.

On that note, poorly designed "escort" or "protect" missions in general. These are what made Strike Suit Infinity basically impossible by level 18 or so because you have to protect carries while you are outnumbered like 20:1. It's insanity.

@jun_aka_pekto: Yes, the obligitory rail turret sequences that seem to punctuate every 1st and 3rd person shooter.

I'll also add games that make heavy or mandatory use of voice control because it almost never works. Lifeline for PS2 was a cool idea but absolutely painful to play. Odama for GC didn't work worth a damn. Binary Domain allowed you to answer dialog choices from your party members or order them in combat, but it didn't work worth a damn. Most of the time it would "hear" the wrong dialog choice and I would lose points with that character. Even Dead Rising 3 for Xbox's voice control would occasionally hear something in the room that sounded like "pause" and it would pause the game, or worse unpause it at the wrong time.

-Byshop

Juggling in Fighting Games

Fetch quests and tasks simply put in games to artificially pad out its length. I don't mind it when context or narrative permits (and also if it's done to reveal new mechanics along the way) but many games don't even attempt to hide this mechanic that exists simply to lengthen a game past what is needed so as to be a bullet point on the back of the box or a footnote in a review. **** padding and fetching shit just for padding' sand fetching's sake. I'd much rather have a 5 hour game excellently paced than a 20 hour one that isn't.

Zelda games are especially guilty of this and I hope Zelda U rectifies this longstanding problem otherwise I won't even bother. It's nothing more than lazy game design.

Puzzles in action games.

I get little satisfaction from solving them, and I absolutely hate getting stuck on them. There are better and more interesting ways to add variety without having to shove in stupid puzzles.

@JangoWuzHere:

I love those, They literally make up The Action Adventure genre........ I think this is one of those things that should be judged on a case by case basis... Darksiders had some pretty good Puzzles.... The Batman Games used them to reinvigorate the process of collecting collectables.... Come On man.... Give Puzzles a Chance !!!

@Bigboi500: I would love to get into a clan battle in that game and work with a whole team, the things that really impressses me in that game are the physics, you can demolish a whole building, it's insane, so cool that when the matches start all buildings and everything looks so clean and nice and by the end of the match everything looks like a total warzone with the alarms going off here and there, some cars burning, some buildings collapsing right in front of you. It's a cool game for sure, don't know how long it will last before i get bored of it though, im more into The Last Of Multiplayer and are more of a 3rd person gamer than 1st so it's a little different for me to play a game like BF4.

I hate when im on this badass killing spree on BF4 then out of nowhere some dude spawns on his buddy and kills me instantly out of nowhere. Wish i could play a little bit more stealthy in bf4 as well, is that even possible in that game to play 100% stealthy? You probably have to move around alot because of the killcamera in that case? And im guessing it's impossible to not be seen on the minimap when firing a gun, even with a sillencer?

I hate bad checkpoint systems. You know, the ones that force you to do an entire area over again because the checkpoint decided to be at the beginning of the section? (looking at you, Ratchet and Clank series).

Forced stealth never bothered me as long as it's not too difficult to sneak past people.

Now, forced loss battles are what really piss me off, because half the time you don't even know that you're supposed to lose until after the fight ends! So you waste all this time, using every skill/item/tactic in your repertoire, and you waste every resource you have before the boss either stomps you with a critical damage area attack that you can't avoid, or a cutscene happens mid-fight and shows the boss tearing you apart. Seriously, what is that crap? And it's even worse when you're doing well in the fight regardless, but the story says "nope, you lose here." Seriously?!

Save points don't bother me as long as they're abundant and not too far away from each other. If they're too few and far between, then it gets a little irritating, especially when the in-between sections are especially difficult and/or frustrating (Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has this problem)

I also hate luck-based mini-games and/or gameplay. I dislike most things that require chance in order to win. If anything, all it does is frustrate players who can't catch a break and end up rage quitting. Some games do it well, like the Mario Party series (sometimes), but overall, I'd rather not leave anything to chance and use skill, be it skill with button presses or coming up with tactics against enemies.

I also really hate escort missions. Very few games do it well (BioShock Infinite, The Last of Us, Resident Evil 4, Ico, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) because any other time, as opposed to the aforementioned games, your escort is absolutely useless! That, or they're irritating as all hell. Back to Resident Evil 4, the mechanics for that escort mission were downright flawless, but Ashley's voice and personality just...piss me off so much to where I shove her in a trash can any chance I can because I want her to shut the hell up. It also doesn't help that for many escort missions, it leads to you defending said person while they do a task as slowly as they can while you defend them from monster waves. No, don't mind me, I'm just here, dying to make sure you get that water pump up and running....within the next century would be nice, please!

I also hate arbitrary ability loss. If your character is gonna become more powerful throughout the game, don't start them off with a powerful set of abilities, and then take them away within the first five minutes or so. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the biggest offender of this, because you start off being able to take down tough enemies in one sword swing, but then have every single item and skill you possess taken away, and are forced to go the first half of the game with weak ass weapons before finally unlocking magic...after an hour or so of playing. Metroid Prime does this too, but to be fair, you don't start off with too many strong moves, and you're not overpowered against enemies either. You're on a broken space station with dying enemies trying desperately to live while you casually mow them down. You also don't have to spend an hour getting your base abilities back, which will then lead you to obtaining even more powerful items. Doesn't keep it from sucking, but at least the blow is lessened by that.

A minor peeve of mine is dealing with Bosses which have only one way of being killed. A good example is the boss in the last Shangri-La mission of FC4.

For a long time, I had no idea how to kill it even after finishing the SP campaign. I had to jog my memory and remember how I dealt with bosses in recent FPS games (eg Crysis, Warhead, Crysis 3, Hard Reset). It turned out, the vulnerable spot in most of them tended to stand out for short periods of time. I started experimenting in FC4's final Shangri-La mission and eventually found what I needed to do to kill that final boss.

The game in question I was speaking of was Skyrim. And what was really ironic was that after making that post, I went off to the Skyrim Nexus and found a mod for changing the run/walk speeds for all NPC's in the game. MFW:

@foxhound_fox said:

@Byshop said:

@foxhound_fox: Jesus christ, yes. Both in terms of characters that you have to follow as well as characters who follow you. This drove me nuts in escort mission games where the character you have to protect moves as half your speed and has shitty pathfinding. Or all the times in Metro 2033 where you have to follow an NPC to proceed. It's not so bad when you're in a town or safe area and it turns into an Aaron Sorkin-style "walk and walk" cutscene, but when you're out in the open and you're following the character to make progress in the game.

Yornda in Ico was pretty useless, but at least you could grab her by the hand and drag her ass behind you at a decent pace. RE4 was such a breath of fresh air because Ashley moved JUST AS FAST AS LEON. It was the first game I can remember where the escort character wasn't slower than you and was actually smart enough to hit the floor when shit started going down. Unless she was being dragged off, it was actually pretty hard to shoot her by accident.

Silent Hill 4: The Room was one of the worst offenders, because what's-her-butt gets hurt halfway through the game and you have to escort her back through pretty much every area you already have visited (oh yeah, backtracking sucks too) while she gimps along behind you.

On that note, poorly designed "escort" or "protect" missions in general. These are what made Strike Suit Infinity basically impossible by level 18 or so because you have to protect carries while you are outnumbered like 20:1. It's insanity.

-Byshop

The game in question I was speaking of was Skyrim. And what was really ironic was that after making that post, I went off to the Skyrim Nexus and found a mod for changing the run/walk speeds for all NPC's in the game. MFW:

I've tried that mod. It sucks.

Babysitting characters that can die.

@Byshop: Ya, it's annoying. Thats why I love Dues ex HR. Stealth doesn't feel genuine unless you can cover your tracks.

Shallow gameplay and QTE

Ah yes, good 'ole QTEs. Can't believe I forgot to mention that in my OP. :P

How you always have to button mash if your character is ever frozen or turned to stone.

Not a specific mechanic, but variety for the sake of variety. This philosophy negatively impacted Skyward Sword (still an excellent game tho) and outright ruined Sonic Unleashed. What could have been a return to form for Sonic turned out to be one of his worst games ever because of the excruciatingly bad Werehog beat-em-up levels. Play to your game's strengths, developers! That means that Zelda should keep the focus on its beautifully designed dungeons and get rid of boring filler shit and Sonic should be all about fast, thrilling action and nothing else.

Judging from A Link Between Worlds, I think they finally understand that this type of padding is an issue and will address it.

And while it certainly won't break the game for me if Zelda U has this issue as long as the dungeons are great (Zelda has never disappointed in terms of dungeons IMO), it will be disappointing for sure since it's such an easy problem to fix. Axing the bullshit can only improve the game.

i hate having to roam around looking for ammo. This really ruined Wolfenstein New Order for me, its a pain in the ass to spend half the time trying to find ammo rather then playing the game and having fun.

also hate confusing puzzles or mazes in games or a bad map system in which i can't find my way around and end up lost and backtracking all over the place.

Regening HP

Fishing side games.

Weapons/treasures serve only a very specific purpose and are otherwise near or completely useless through the rest of the game. Basically a glorified key. Zelda games are VERY bad with this.

I really dislike over the shoulder cameras, as in Dead Space, Shadows of the Damned, etc. It just annoys me. It's like they do it to breed artificial tension. So not cool.

action wheels

I hate: Vehicle sequences, forced stealth, escort missions, fetch quests...

Not a game mechanic but fvck invisible barriers.

making an open world game feel "more real" with forcing you to drive home after every day/mission to go to bed and sleep...

.."MAFIA 2" was a great game but always driving home for miles only to go to bed was really a fu``in pain in the a$$ after a while, especially because i often wanted to speed up things by driving insanely fast and often crashing, ending up dead and having to repeat the whole frigging process..not to mention the ammount of speed tickets i got that way and losing some money on it....yeah, it feels more real but if i want reality i drive my own fucking car home and go to sleep myself, no need to do that shit in a game all the time

i just hope they dont do the same shit with mafia 3

the same for certain completely "useless" side-missions like in GTA IV, drive that idiot from here to there, get that bitch from point A, drive her to point B, go out with her and have some "fun", drive her back to point A again

but the most pain of all are autosaves kicking in BEFORE a goddamn cutscene you cant even skip, prefered mostly BEFORE the encounter with a frigging levelboss of course, where you keep dying and having to watch the goddamn cutscene for dozens of times again and again and again and again and again...

QTEs. just bad and lazy.

Time limits on games/sections. no. bad developer....bad!

forced stealth with a poorly developed stealth system. i like stealth games. i dont mind games with forced stealth parts in a stealth game with very well developed stealth mechanics. but forced stealth in a FPS with a barely functioning stealth system is just awful.

black and white decisions. ME really suffered from this. i think in the first game they tried to make the player think about their responses. but by game 2 it was just a case if pick the blue option to be good or the red option to be bad. one day i must go back and play the trilogy again and make the decisions as i would have made them instead of focusing on maxing my blue/red bar. i will probably get the worst ending :P.

grinding. i beeping hate grinding. i dont want to kill 20 bunnies to gain experience so i can level up and kill 20 slightly bigger bunnies. thats not fun....its just a pain. i loved Guild wars 1 because the grind was taken out of the game (they did add it back in later but that was just for achievements. your character didnt suffer if you didnt grind). GW2 brought it back and suffered. they tried really hard to hide it but its a grind.

Not being able to skip a boss fight or a portion of a level that is simply too hard to complete, I'm currently stuck on the Depository mission in Metro 2033 with the Librarians, I read a walkthrough that says run from them but I'm too scared to do the level now, I actually had a panic attack trying to do the level. That is the only thing that really scares me running from something scary and those Librarians are frightful, I can't do running from things lol. It's on my Xbox One so I can't load a cheat, I don't think I'll even get past that level, I wish I could find out what happens next past that level.

One would hope.

I'll believe it when I see it. Zelda needs to fix its intros and padding. I'd also like to see an overall more cohesive experience, as a large part of Zelda's appeal in the past has not only been the dungeons, but the journey in between them. Now, everything else feels like a chore to get to them. A chore that I'm no longer willing to work through. The whole game will need to be fun from start to finish.

Zelda has a hell of a lot to fix before I'll look at it again.

A million times this!

Wait, the game actually caused you to have a panic attack? Shit, man, I know certain game sections can be frustrating or scary, but I'd say **** that and just move on to a different game if it's causing panic attacks. That's messed up. Be careful.

You mean you hate Half-life????

limited inventory. it's usually the worst part of any game it's in.