I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
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I hate anything that stops me from playing the game. Stun mechanics, usually, but I also include quick time events.
The one that sticks in my mind was those dumb water mages in genshin impact. They trap you in a bubble and hold you there for a few seconds. If it’s an intense enough fight, a few seconds is an incredibly long time, and you’re just sitting there watching the game happen and you’ve lost your agency. It’s worse for me because I had built shields and healing into my team to shore up my shortcomings with dodging. It felt clever, but them the game sends in this mechanic which invalidates my solution.
With quick time events, I just get annoyed at the genre switch. Don’t get me wrong, there are cool enough cinematics out there… It’s just… Like usually I’m watching these and thinking, “wow, that would’ve been fun to do, you know, myself.”
Nevermind that I’m too ADHD. Like I have cats and a partner and a phone. If I get a buzz or whatever else, I might miss the prompt. Or if I ignore the buzz, whatever that might have been can sometimes get discarded in my brain.
For positivity:
I love team building. The interplay of abilities, the hard choices with limited slots and opportunity cost. Finding unintentional synergies, or even stumbling on them. Its all a dream, and it’s part of why I love ttrpgs so much.
I can sometimes get so bogged down (positive) with team building I never make it amywhere in the game itself.
Also love me a good physics engine. God knows how many hours I spent building stupid shit in Garry’s Mod. I learned to code before I played that game, so it was delightful to put those skills to use with wiremod as a little kid. LoZ: ToTK I have like 1000 hrs logged just fucking around in the builder spot at the base of Tarry Town.
Love - auto health or shield regen. When I first experienced that in Halo it made me instantly hate other games that didn’t have some form of that mechanic.
I hate managing health inventory items. It breaks gameplay flow with tedious bullshit that isn’t nearly as fun as focusing on the a combat mechanic.
I’m exactly the opposite. I feel like regeneration makes avoiding damage feel trivial and doesn’t reward you for playing well.
You also have to wait around hiding to heal INSTEAD of playing the game. Same thing with reloading. That’s why doom 2016 and eternal so good.
The Estus Flask in Dark Souls was great. You couldn’t spam a million of them on a boss fight but you also got them all back when you were safe. There wereots of things to dislike but that was a major positive. And to your point, it’s not buried in a menu either. It’s just right there.
Auto health makes the game oriented around taking as much cover as possible. You just pop out, shoot, and then jump back to hiding again.
The newer Doom games for example uses limited health to force you be that cool action hero who is participating in the action. Health is regained by killing enemies. If they had regen the player would just be back to hiding behind covers like cowards.
Doom was interesting because it was a solution to both of those problems at once. Doom shouldn’t be a cover shooter, but hunting for health packs is not action packed or fun, so the enemies became health packs.
The junction system in Final Fantasy VIII. The magic system is based on the amount of spells you have left in an inventory and you can also equip them to your character’s stats. If you don’t take the time to acquaint yourself with the system your stats will take a dive because you’re casting spells like in a more traditional game. The upside to this is if you hoard enough spells and equip them to the right stats you can be unstoppable since early game.
Don’t waste my time. That’s my biggest thing in games. Death Stranding was fun but holy shit. Everything had animations. Just sooooo many. It made even the most simple tasks take so long. Why do I need to see so much when I deliver a box? Why do I need to see Sam get in a truck? It irks me so much.
It would help if there was unique animations each time, but it’s the same exact movement that makes it get tiresome.
Hate: Tapping, quick time events, looting animations, long loading screens especially when you’re expected to die often, game taking control away from the player or excessive input latency, long NPC expositions for fetch quests.
Love: addictive gameplay loops that are borderline checklists but fun (Far Cry, Days Gone hordes, Ghost of Tsushima camps etc.), environmental impact like in Death Stranding/reactive NPCs like in Bethesda RPGs.
QTE can be done well imho, for example in Yakuza series they are rare enough to not annoy you and not THAT important but if you can hit them when they appear, it makes your hit just more powerful
I’ve never gotten over how annoying the food / injury system in Metal Gear Solid 3 was. I almost didn’t play it because 30 minutes in it pissed me off so much.
Collecting hidden items. Ever since Assassin’s Creed 2 with the fucking feathers, I have hated collecting hidden items. Especially when they gain you absolutely nothing except an achievement. It’s like they are trying to artificially increase the number of hours played.
I’m with you when it’s generic, way too numerous items like those damned feathers.
I’m all for collectibles when they’re interesting, meaningful, and not too numerous. But I think most games and especially open world games really just want to pad the completionist time.
Horizon is a game that did collectibles much better, with the exception perhaps of data points (which aren’t marked on the map for some reason). The collectibles in Horizon are unique, have story, and are usually actually interesting to get to. I noticed often in Horizon, they were just so interesting to either get to (the case for ornaments) or had fascinating story (like the ones that unlock images of the past).
Not something I essentially hate, but I roll my eyes every time there is a running-out-of-a-crumbling-building-before-it-collapses scene in a game.
Something I really don’t like is stamina that runs out after running for like five seconds
limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
In some sense that’s correct. You’d have more options, but you wouldn’t take them. Having a limited inventory forces you to make choices. Yes, you can use that scroll/potion/whatever, because you’re gonna run out of room, so feel free. On the other hand, I think that many devs don’t consider inventory management enough! I think that it’s often an afterthought and could use more dev attention.
What game mechanics do you love and hate?
Hate: instakills. Diablo 4 and Risk of Rain 2 are my current games that have this. ROR2 is not as bad, you can prevent this by getting enough defensive items. D4 is worse about this. You can be chewing thru trash mobs just fine but get to a boss and immediately die. There’s no ramp up to this.
There are certainly many games that shouldn’t have limited inventories that have them, but I also think there are many games for which a limited inventory enhance the game. I do enjoy games that make me make decisions about what I want to take with me and budget my inventory space when it makes sense.
If you play RoR2 on PC, you owe it to yourself to install some Quality of Life mods, like one that fixes or improves the game’s built in one shot protection. Also, auto sprint.
I do. Thanks! I didn’t even realize there were mods.
Inventory management is one aspect of Diablo 1 that I liked a lot. If you played MP, you could either transfer your gear to mules… But if you wanted to play “as the game is intended”, you had very limited space to carry between games and had to choose which items you want to carry with you to the next game. I did a playthrough through the 3 difficulties with Warrior a few years ago and I loved having to make these choices.
On the topic of instakills, I always mod them out of Fallout 4 and Skyrim, because it’s annoying as hell that I can be instakilled from full HP, when it would otherwise take several hits to even endanger me.
I love mystery games, so–
Love: When mystery games actively draw attention to the idea that you need to draw your own conclusions about what you find in the game, and make your own truth, instead of just following a track
Hate: when the above is expressed as a formalized “Mind Palace” mechanic à la the more recent Sherlock Holmes games. That’s just covering the track with a tarp instead of letting you build your own theories. Either let people accuse who they want with the evidence they have (once again I plug Paradise Killer) or acknowledge that there’s only one acceptable answer
Sounds like you’d love and hate Phoenix Wright.
I’ve played a little. It’s okay. The one I was playing didn’t do anything approximating the Mind Palace and was very, very linear-- which I think is better than the Sherlock Holmes style games. It was the everything else about it that annoyed me into turning it off!
I love when games use as few invisible walls as possible, and don’t stop you from exploring weird places or even out of bounds. There doesn’t even have to be a reward, just the feeling of getting somewhere where you’re not supposed to be is enough. Ultrakill and Anodyne 2 both do this really well.
I also love rich, responsive, low-restriction movement mechanics, which kinda ties in with the first point. I love when games let me chain all sorts of moves together for wild bullshit midair acrobatics, zipping and bouncing and flinging myself all over the place constantly. Good examples are Ultrakill, Pseudoregalia, Sally Can’t Sleep, and Cruelty Squad. On the flipside, Demon Turf is a game I hated and dropped quickly because of how artificially and pointlessly limited the movement felt.
You might like the Serious Sam games. The developers didn’t really bother with invisible walls and so on most levels you can go in any direction until either the level geometry prevents you or until you reach the point where the developers finally gave a shit and put an invisible wall. It even rewards you for this on quite a few levels with some really well hidden secret goodies.
I hate quick time events.
The early God of War games were so unbelievably brutal for these. On harder difficulties, I would often master a boss only to have to retry it again a few more times because the quick time events to actually finish them off would be kicking my ass.
Fahrenheit flashbacks… :(
What I nightmare of a game that was
Hey! The first half was actually really good. The second half didn’t happen.
Seriously, I remember replaying Fahrenheit like 2 or 3 times and always stopping at the halfway mark. That very first level in the diner promised soooo much, and the game never delivered.
I agree. The game starts off really good. Too bad they made it like this.
I will take your example and just pretend the second part didn’t happen.
Ah a cutscene. Let me put my controller down, grab my drink an-
“PUSH ‘A’, MOTHERFUCKER! DO IT NOW! DO IT! Aww, you fucked it up. Way to go idiot! Why did you think you could relax for even a moment?”
(hard coded behaviors) Like when you think that you are supposed to died but you can’t, or some character seems like it could die but it can’t. It feels like the devs are playing with you
puzzles mechanics in games that are not about them.
I’m looking at you, DiMA from Fallout 4 Far Harbor
Or puzzles that are completely esoteric or unintuitive. Just replayed some of the Myst games, and it’s like “oh ok I was stuck on this for 30min because the lever was on the other side of the map and there was literally no indication that it was related”. That’s just artificially inflating your game’s difficulty, and it’s lazy puzzle making. Boooo
The Myst series of games had an unfortunate amount of unintuitive puzzles. Most games in that era that included puzzles did.
I’ve been whining to everyone in earshot about all the puzzles in remnant 2 hahaha
