Gaming Mechanic you hate the most!!!!

[TitanAtlas]

ill have to agree with the regenerating health has

Rechargeable shields and/or regenerating health, nothing drives me crazy like having an enemy that's almost run away and come back with full health. With every game having it these days, it starts feeling like less of a feature and more of a delaying tactic to make the game longer.

i hate that mechanic has well... to kill a enemy thats a torn on the side, but somehow he escapes, heals, and all my bullets were a waste, bringing me to attack the same enemy for more time... hate that...

also im not a fan of the regenerative health these days... makes the game too easy.. no challenge... i remember playing a fps and be on the edge of everything, looking for health and trying to survive... i was afraid of dying, and having to restart the mission/ area/ from checkpoint all over again... now THAT made me more aware of my surroundings... i was always looking for more ways to waste less ammo or dont include myself in the gunfire has much, and finding more health to give me more chance against my challenges...

 

[Rayne870]

After a very long time of playing WoW, I hate HUDs on all games now unless they are part of a simulation. It feels very unnatural for me to have ammo counters and such cluttering the screen. Yes they are useful and all but after playing WoW and having so many damn buttons on screen and bars and junk I just hate everything that obscures my view of the game world.

 

[Nightvalien]

regenerating health fuck that and i hope the bastard that came up with that idea gets violated by a group of albino midgets.

 

[Apprentice88]

Quick Time Events

Always interupting my fun by making simple tasks impossible, a lazy excuse for a game mechanic, and if I ever discover who invented them I will travel back in time and have them flogged until they apologise.

 

[Judgement101]

When someone tries to change up turn based systems. Like FFXIII, that was awful. You have to fill a bar to use an attack? Thats just stupid. Only game to ever get the change right was Frozen Synapse and Valyria Chronicles (And Opertaion Darkness arguabley)

 

[PekoponTAS]

"You beat the final boss! Oh wait! There's a super secret final boss after that! What an unexpected twist! Oh, turns out it's the cheapest, hardest thing in the game! Looks like you lost, sucks to be you. Want another try at it? Okay then, but first you have to fight the guy you THOUGHT was the final boss again just to get another try. Allow me to laugh in your face now. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

I'm mostly referring to puzzle games that pull this nonsense on you, like Pokemon Puzzle League and the Super Famicom version of Kirby's Star Stacker. I understand that's how it works in other games, but in those games you can at least be sure you'll beat the first guy again without much trouble. In puzzle games it's not like that. Gary is just about as hard as Mewtwo, and in both fights there's only really one very EXACT way to beat them, and it's already rare for it to happen even once, let alone twice in a row.

 

[Omechron]

1) Microtransaction content that provides gameplay advantages. I drop games IMMEDIATELY for this.

2) Repeated use of the same voice clips, especially as a boss tell. No line of dialog is witty after it's repeated 15 times.

3) Teleporter mazes. Rote memorization + traversing the same terrain repeatedly = fail.

4) Quick Time Events. Just in general. At best they break flow. At worst they make you watch cut scenes over again.

5) Cut scenes that show your character doing things he can't actually do.

6) Long boring fetch quests and unskipable cut scenes especially right at the start of the game. Both major kingdom hearts games did this. What the heck is the thinking behind this? It seems to SPECIFICALLY discourage multiple playthroughs. I can understand doing this in some cases for story purposes but at least make it so you can skip that stuff on your second game with some sort of New Game Plus option.

 

[HandsomeZer0]

Pointless DLC, QTE's in any game besides resident evil 4, Cover based combat.
Argh! I'm normally quite content in gaming but those 3 can chow down on a shotgun.

 

[Sozac]

Fucking Karma Meter, Paragon/Renegade Bar, every other moral allignment thing
They are so stupid. I don't need this. They serve no purpose except to make you play the game more than one way. Except they force you to play it either good or bad and thats no fun.
Also, they have video game logic with them. Like in Fallout 3 I hated doing the evil option because it was always kill a kitty morally black evil. So what I did to get the achievements was I stole all I could and still went with the good choices for most of the major ones like with the slaves. And Three-Dog would still greet me as the horror of the wastes. But yeah they need to get rid of that or fix it somehow.

 

[HaussVonHorne]

Shitty "Friendly" A.I.

Nothing ruins a game more than bad A.I. that's supposed to help you and only fucks you over. BRINK being the puke encrusted, poopoo crown-wearing lord of this problem.

 

[-Samurai-]

"Press x to climb" over a waist high wall. It takes so much longer to use that animation than to just back up and jump over it or jump-crouch into a window, and leaves you extremely vulnerable to enemy fire.

Also, cut-scenes that change what your character was wearing or using as a weapon to the default stuff. I know it's not really important, but if I was carrying a pistol and dressed as a clown when I went into the cut-scene, why do I now have an M4 and am dressed as a Marine?

 

[darksakul]

Time Limits
Quick time Events
Fetch Quests
Invisible barriers preventing you from backtracking, even if the area in question is in plain sight.

 

[SovietX]

I dont like in open world games when it takes forever to get to your objectives. Some games are good at entertaining you during the journey (Saints Row 2) and some that make you want to put a bullet in your skull (Far Cry 2)

Also regenerating health annoys me. I miss health packs.

 

[Vibhor]

Two weapons limit.
It was cool when halo did it first time but now it is just balls.
Quick time event.
I cannot express how much I hate those.

 

[TheMadTypist]

I'm pretty much just parroting everyone here, but:

Time Limits, these are usually there just to make me scream incoherently, and even when I can succeed at the mission/event in question, I don't enjoy it because I spend the entire time worrying about how much time is left on the clock, even if I have a significant lead.

Quick Time Events, when poorly implemented. I can see a quick time event working well when it's an optional thing that the PLAYER can initiate, but popping these into cutscenes or making it a frequent, environment-initiated and required part of gameplay turns them into diabolical engines of frustration.

Completely Regenerating Health, because while having a layer of protection you can rely on when you're on your last legs is great, but cowering behind a corner for a few seconds to make it like you were never clumsy enough to get hit in the first place is terrible. It usually breaks the pace of the game, it breaks immersion (for me, although I can see an argument going the other way), and usually means that developers will compensate the reduced difficulty of health management by giving you hardly any health (which results in EVEN MORE FREQUENT hiding until the mortal wound fades away).

Singleplayer Weapon Limits, seriously. I'd rather developers let me deal with the presented situations with all the tools I've encountered up to that point, not just the ones they think I'll need to get to the next segment.

Checkpoints without Quicksave Options, although I understand the useful nature of the autosave, preventing me from saving progress between checkpoints is incredibly frustrating, especially over the more difficult segments. It also discourages me from trying new/risky things, which often results using the same tactics over and over, not necessarily because I enjoy them but because I feel like I'm being punished for trying anything else.

Idiot RTS Campaign AI, because it feels silly if my opponent never builds any more units than the buildings/army it starts with and just stands there until I move into sight.

 

[Et3rnalLegend64]

When someone tries to change up turn based systems. Like FFXIII, that was awful. You have to fill a bar to use an attack? Thats just stupid. Only game to ever get the change right was Frozen Synapse and Valyria Chronicles (And Opertaion Darkness arguabley)

But Final Fantasy has been doing that for a while. At least since FF6. To my knowledge, the most polished version of it was FFX-2 where everyone could move as soon as their bar was filled instead of waiting until the last person was done with their animation. It also included mid-battle class changing akin to FF13's Paradigms. FF13 just made the animations fancier. So yeah, older than you think.

 

[Et3rnalLegend64]

Fucking Karma Meter, Paragon/Renegade Bar, every other moral allignment thing
They are so stupid. I don't need this. They serve no purpose except to make you play the game more than one way. Except they force you to play it either good or bad and thats no fun.
Also, they have video game logic with them. Like in Fallout 3 I hated doing the evil option because it was always kill a kitty morally black evil. So what I did to get the achievements was I stole all I could and still went with the good choices for most of the major ones like with the slaves. And Three-Dog would still greet me as the horror of the wastes. But yeah they need to get rid of that or fix it somehow.

Did you even play Mass Effect before you lumped its Karma meter with those of other games? Both sides of the Mass Effect meter aren't mutually exclusive, so it's not "forcing" you to do anything. It's not "If you're evil, eat this kitten to prove it" either. Shepard is always a hero technically. The difference is just now nice he/she is when getting results.

 

[BeerTent]

Regenerative Health! It's backwards, it's boring as fuck, it kills the challenge and you cannot scale difficulty in shooters with it properly. I've only seen one modern game where it worked because hanging health-kits everywhere would be silly in Mirror's Edge.

The sooner we abolish this, the quicker we can get back to fun, challenging games that require you to think and act at the same time. Regen health instantly killed the Mass Effect series for me, dulled out chain-saw attachments on rifles for me, and prettymuch locks me out of a par-at-best series of shooters in which most of my friends play.

 

[bombadilillo]

All these complaints are valid, but from poor execution rather then an inherent poor mechanic.

QTE. Res Evil 4 did them perfect. Only a couple different possibilities, if failed the cutscene came back to is a second later. No GoW BS whole bossfight to be redone with random QTE. F that.

Escort mission. Again Res evil 4 did this great. Partner stayed with you, ducked under your fire. This is my most hated mechanic and that game did it great.

Health regen. I personally dont like this and think Far Cry 2 had the best health system to date. But regen works with context. Great in halo with a scifi shield, immersion breaking in Cod with supposed realism. While we're at it, fuck that red jelly.

I guess the point is, don't hate the mechanic, hate the failed implementation. I bet every one has a game where it worked fine it. Or almost every one, has to be an exception.