Malf on 2/3/2018 at 10:56

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GAH!
Myself, I can't stand RTWP in RPGs, especially when that form of combat has been crowbarred in to an adapted pen-and-paper ruleset that is traditionally turn-based.

Things that annoy me?
Achievements. Especially when achievement systems can't be turned off (I'm looking at you Steam).
A very few games have done interesting things with achievements, most of them from Capcom. But these days, they break immersion, and can railroad players in to playing in particular ways. Achievements at their worst are hollow gamification used to bypass actual game design, checklists of drudgery.
I think Nintendo recognised this early on, which is why to this day they don't have an achievement system.

Reams and reams of dry text exposition leaning heavily on made-up words. Yeah, as well as being RTWP, Pillars of Eternity pulled this shit, and I ended up not giving a fuck.

While I appreciate some games that need a wiki in order to play them (such as Dwarf Fortress), others have no excuse. In particular, the arcane and cryptic obfuscation of systems in many of the Souls' games. Initially, it was quite a kick immersing myself in systems outside of the game. But now I've got very little patience for the byzantine unreadability of mechanics in games such as Bloodborne. So many items with unexplained dependencies, so many badly-named stats and abilities, with game-changing symbiotic bonds hidden from the user by shambolic user-interface design.

But I'm a bit of a Souls grump anyway. I rinsed Demon's Souls twice over when it came out, in part because at the time I was without a decent gaming PC. And I've grown increasingly tired of the basic formula which hasn't changed at all over the course of what, five games now? Basically, it was fun the first time around, still pretty cool the second time, but is now hard up against the cliff-face of the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Or maybe I'm just pissed off that they recently turned off the Demon's Souls servers, which segues nicely in to my next point...

The gaming community's acceptance of publishers making the running of game-servers a purely in-house operation.
It ties up with horrible intellectual property exploitation and profit maximisation strategies, and guarantees the loss of certain important games. How many MMOs have died purely because even upon dying, greedy intellectual property owners have refused to release server and source code to the community?

That kind of greed-driven behaviour has also been responsible for the death of mapping and modding in the FPS genre. In particular, I find it insulting that now that id are owned by Bethesda, you no longer see their SDKs being released publicly, or code being open-sourced for id games developed under Bethesda's ownership.
I think/hope this kind of behaviour may very well end up biting them in the arse. An engine is only strong as long as it has a large community of people willing and able to learn how to use it. And id were already fighting a losing battle against the Unreal engine before the Bethesda buyout. Now that the only people experienced with modern id tools are those employed by Bethesda, they'll have an ever-shrinking pool of talent to choose from.

Thankfully, Tim Sweeney and Epic are still doing a good job making their tools widely available to the community, but there's a part of me that balks at the idea that one party may end up dominating the commercial game engine space. Yes, Unity's around, but the feeling I get is that it's still not as highly regarded or easy to use as Unreal, just cheaper.

And there's also a lot to be said for the developer of an engine making a game for hobbyists to develop around. How many professional developers got started by modding and mapping their favourite game?
I know for certain that there would be no Call of Duty if it weren't for Quake 3 being so mod friendly.

Rassen, frassen.

Sorry, went a bit off-piste there.

twisty on 2/3/2018 at 11:14

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QTEs
Complete changes in gameplay halfway through a game. E.g. deadlight
Ramifications of decisions made earlier in the game that make it impossible to win the game. E.g. xcom
Old skool pixel graphics for the sake of it. E.g. Too many examples
Certain types of art styles such as Warhammer and Torchlight
Mobile games without paid versions (I.e. I'd rather pay for a game then have ads and never ending in-app purchase nags)

Malf on 5/3/2018 at 09:21

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BLARGH!
Had another prime example of unexplained mechanics this weekend. I started Hellblade. Nowhere in the game does it tell you that you can recover from being downed by hammering a button. It subtly implies that you can recover, with the voices telling you to get up, but nowhere does it actually come out and say how to do this.

This would be acceptable if we were still buying games the way we used to, where you'd get a physical box and a manual. But if you're mostly targeting digital sales these days, you better make damn sure all a game's mechanics are explained in the game itself.

Ostriig on 5/3/2018 at 11:52

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If we're talking features, as in intentional gameplay design rather than oversights, bugs and other contrivances, off the top of my head:
- save limitations;
- forced third-person cover/stealth in first-person games;
- arbitrary per-item inventory limitations instead to aggregate encumberance;

I'm sure I'd hate lootboxes if I ever played a game with lootboxes, too.

Pyrian on 5/3/2018 at 17:53

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Heh. That's awesome. Are there at least any clues that it might happen?

Riddles. Indeed any time I have to guess at what the game mechanics are going to be. I like obstacles where you know the mechanics and have to use them to progress. I don't like obstacles where you have to figure out (or just guess) what the mechanics are.