What is the worst adopted game mechanic?

Every once in awhile whilst playing games I run into some tedious mechanics that I absolutely cannot stand. The one that takes the cake for me is weight, I didn't mind the TQ/Torchlight/Diablo 2 burden system which allows you to carry x amount of slots, or the wow one(which was better). But when weight comes into the mix it is really a pain in the ass. I cannot help but feel that Witcher 2(what i'm currently playing) would have just been plain BETTER without the burden mechanic. Just because its realistic doesn't make it desirable... if it was for realism, there should have been a mechanic every couple of days that would not allow you to run because your constipated because you didn't take a shit...

What game mechanic do you hate the most? Is it weight? is it turn based mechanics? lets hear it.

randomly triggered encounters is one

I dont mind weight, if the weights make since.

• Wall-cover.

The point of an action game is the be exciting and visceral. Glueing yourself to a wall, popping your head up now and again to shoot brain dead AI, is casual and very boring I find. MDK with circle strafing is far more fun than the gears of war or Mass Effects.

@whyareyoucrouchingspock said:

• Wall-cover.

The point of an action game is the be exciting and visceral. Glueing yourself to a wall, popping your head up now and again to shoot brain dead AI, is casual and very boring I find. MDK with circle strafing is far more fun than the gears of war or Mass Effects.

true, it's weird when cover is pretty much a pause button. You basically have to fool yourself into thinking there is tension but the reality is you could just sit behind cover and take your sweet time deciding what weapon to use, etc.

First off, fuck you turn based games are the best. Off the top of my head, this stuff always gets me annoyed in games:

• When a game takes control away from you and forces your character to make decisions you wouldn't make for the sake of some story event happening.
• Long drawn out intros where you can do nothing but watch make replaying games a nightmare. Skyrim is the most recent example of this.
• When you have to press a button to pick up ammo instead of just walking near it.
• When a game uses that terrible wheel Bioware has adopted for all their games to pick dialogue choices and the choice you make never matches what the short hand description says or implies.
• Really sick of Evil/Good binary alignment systems. Nothing is inherently good/bad, and I feel that it's just lazy writing to not make situations where a player could justify any outcome if they approach it from a different point of view. Dragon Age: Origins was masterful at doing so.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

Games with quests that have no consequences. Skyrim did a good job with this, mostly.

@egg said:

@whyareyoucrouchingspock said:

• Wall-cover.

The point of an action game is the be exciting and visceral. Glueing yourself to a wall, popping your head up now and again to shoot brain dead AI, is casual and very boring I find. MDK with circle strafing is far more fun than the gears of war or Mass Effects.

true, it's weird when cover is pretty much a pause button. You basically have to fool yourself into thinking there is tension but the reality is you could just sit behind cover and take your sweet time deciding what weapon to use, etc.

That's just in poorly designed games though. If it was designed properly then the AI would be flanking you, lobbing grenades to flush you out, or hanging back and letting their AI buddies with long range take you out. If they design the combat situation well then cover is just a temporary device to let you move forward through a wall of attacking enemies.

Long unskippable intros.

Long unskippable tutorials.

That everything needs voiced dialogue nowadays.

Higher difficulties that just make stuff take longer to kill, not harder.

@crusader8463 said:

• When a game uses that terrible wheel Bioware has adopted for all their games to pick dialogue choices and the choice you make never matches what the short hand description says or implies.

I remember when I played DA2, I talked to Anders and there was a "good guy option". It was like: "You should relax." or something like that. I thought he's gonna be like: "Hey bro, chill a little bit." type of thing and instead Hawke started to flirt with him. What? That's not-... asshole!

Two weapon systems. It completely removes the lack of choice.

Regenerating health. It completely removes the challenge when you can jump behind a wall and become another bullet sponge in 5 seconds. The ONLY game I can think of that did it somewhat properly was the Riddick: Butcher Bay/Assault on Dark Athena compilation. With health blocks that disappear when they're gone, but can still be regenerated so long as they're not fully depleted. I'm sure some others did it the same way but this one jumps to mind.

Quick time events. Self explanatory.

Difficulties that only buff enemy health while reducing yours instead of being meaningful AI tweaks.

Wall cover. Some games get it right, most degrade into a chest high wall simulator.

I have to agree with @whyareyoucrouchingspock. Wall-covering is, for the most part, a horribly executed idea that only slows down the pacing. And on top of that. Snapping into cover while trying to revive a team mate in ME3 multiplayer... infuriating as hell.

Another one is hacking minigames. The appeal of a minigame fade really fast, almost per definition. Why do I have to repeat it every ten minutes? That's insane.

@egg said:

randomly triggered encounters is one

I was gonna say the sticky-cover thing, but that's more down to overuse. I don't think anything can top random encounters for being infuriating.

arbitrary over powered bosses that only serve to frustrate.

I really don't like the blood on the screen thing in fps's.

@crusader8463 said:

First off, fuck you turn based games are the best.

*Ditto*

• Long drawn out intros where you can do nothing but watch make replaying games a nightmare. Skyrim is the most recent example of this.

That scene was so boring it made me start messing around with the console. I discovered how hilarious it is to use "kill" on the lead horse and have your wagon speed down the hill out of control, eventually flipping infinitely into the sky.

Then I made a save file just after that scene so I could start from there whenever I wanted to make a new character.

Aaaaaanyway~... I really hate slot-based inventories (both the Tetris kind and the arbitrary number limit). Every time I play through Baldur's Gate 2, I make a bee-line immediately for all the places I know which sell containers (scroll and potion cases, the ammo belt, etc) because you accumulate crap so quickly and it's just no fun having to play "manage the inventory" instead of play the game.

That kind of applies to every game with an inventory system. I'm like Vinny where I'll just download a hack that removes the weight limit. It just detracts from the enjoyment I have playing the game.

omg DOUBLE JUMP

(except where it is actually a 2nd jump, not just, press jump button again to stall your fall)

and then making double jump mandatory for 99 percent of all jumps in the game. that's just... I mean come on

Enemies spawning in plain sight.

Cutscenes. Why does my Max Payne 3 have cutscenes?

@AiurFlux: Resistance used a similar mechanic (at least the first one, haven't played the other 2). It was the exact same system, IIRC. You had 4 blocks of health and they would recharge only to the block with health left (if you lost 1 block, you'd only have 3 left until you get a medpack).

As for me, I really can't stand tetris style inventory management. As much as I like tetris, I don't want to play it inside of another game. The jelly screen in some shooters can be really obnoxious too. I suppose that's not really a mechanic, but still.

It seems to me that most of the things that people are complaining about here are bad game design, not bad mechanics.

I wish that not every game had regenerating health. I know that there are about 10 different good reasons for using it, but that doesn't mean that EVERY game has to have it. There is a tension and a flow to static health that I miss.

Excessive quick time events.

Cutscenes I cannot skip if I want to.

Having to press extra buttons to confirm and reconfirm actions.

Go into inventory menu, select an item, choose to drop it.

Drop Item, choose yes or no. Yes. I said drop it. YES.

Here, now have a dropped item confirmation box, "You dropped it", you get to press ANOTHER button to close this confirmation.

Now press B twenty-seven times to exit the menu.

Random ecounters are the fucking worst. Some games make them bearable, like Nocturne with its warning system, but for the most part they can ruin a game for me.

Also, games that won't boot without button presses.

Especially when they have fifteen splash screens you can't skip and have to wait thru. You want to turn it on, walk away for awhile, and come back when all that crap is done. But some games make you sit there to press buttons before they will boot - "Don't turn it off while its saving!"...press button, "We're syncing your trophies and we can't just do it without you confirming you know we are doing it!"...press button. "You are online"...press button.

Even worse when the dashboard itself does this. Thanks Sony.

Having a grenade button. I will probably be in the minority but I preferred when I had to switch to grenades to throw them. Seemed like less grenade spam.

@gamefreak9: I know that feel bro. That's why I downloaded a mod on the PC version that makes every item weightless. So much better.

Also, a escort missions. Especially with NPCs that you need to protect and they're weak as fuck.

Random encounters.

QTE

@crusader8463 said:

@egg said:

@whyareyoucrouchingspock said:

• Wall-cover.

The point of an action game is the be exciting and visceral. Glueing yourself to a wall, popping your head up now and again to shoot brain dead AI, is casual and very boring I find. MDK with circle strafing is far more fun than the gears of war or Mass Effects.

true, it's weird when cover is pretty much a pause button. You basically have to fool yourself into thinking there is tension but the reality is you could just sit behind cover and take your sweet time deciding what weapon to use, etc.

That's just in poorly designed games though. If it was designed properly then the AI would be flanking you, lobbing grenades to flush you out, or hanging back and letting their AI buddies with long range take you out. If they design the combat situation well then cover is just a temporary device to let you move forward through a wall of attacking enemies.

Exactly. Cover is not a inherantly bad thing. Vanquish uses cover well, in that it is not optimal to glue yourself to a piece of it. That game is exciting and visceral.

I hate random encounters just for the fact that it you are trying to get somewhere with the quickness you encounter monsters every half step. Then when you want to grind you don't encounter a monster for a good five seconds between battles (that can make grinding a bigger chore than it already is).

@Gargantuan said:

That everything needs voiced dialogue nowadays.

Agreed. The current era insistence on voice dialogue for everything has resulted in many modern RPG's turning out to be of lesser depth and quality of story than in the past. It's okay to have text dialogue in RPG's, developers. The majority of players skip your painstakingly recorded voice anyway and just read through the subtitles. I would much prefer minor character and unimportant major character dialogue be text only over having your game feel like it was recorded by five guys doing hundreds of characters each.

@Deathmachine117: This is a bad opinion and you should feel bad for having it.

@AhmadMetallic said:

Cutscenes. Why does my Max Payne 3 have cutscenes?

Huh? Cutscenes are a pretty damn important storytelling tool. Not sure why it would be a bad thing in Max Payne's case, but I'm not sure bagging on cutscenes themselves is a good idea.

I don't really know if this is a game mechanic but I don't like how the new Metal Gear game, Rising, Is a hack and slash...

Other than that I can't really think of anything that's bugged me drastically. I don't usually get annoyed by games too often.

Jeez, I actually like most of the stuff mentioned in this thread.

Are we talking about bad mechanics, or mechanics that have been poorly implemented in the games one's played? I've see pretty much everything here used well at some point.

All of Far Cry 2.

@egg said:

randomly triggered encounters is one

That right there is my primary reason for hating most JRPGs.

For me, unskippable cutscenes takes the cake, especially when an autosave happens directly before the scene and then you have a boss battle directly after.

I think weight limits can add a lot to games when done right.

@whyareyoucrouchingspock said:

• Wall-cover.

The point of an action game is the be exciting and visceral. Glueing yourself to a wall, popping your head up now and again to shoot brain dead AI, is casual and very boring I find. MDK with circle strafing is far more fun than the gears of war or Mass Effects.

That's why you get good at gears. That way even on the higher difficulties you are not stopping for long. That games mechanics are way deeper than just waiting behind cover for your shield to recharge, doing that is a good way to die.

@HerbieBug said:

@Gargantuan said:

That everything needs voiced dialogue nowadays.

The majority of players skip your painstakingly recorded voice anyway and just read through the subtitles.

Speak for yourslef I don't like reading walls of text there's a time and place to have those but dialog should be spoken.

@selbie said:

Enemies spawning in plain sight.

This. I'd add to it multiple waves of enemies respawning just off-camera.

Quick Time Events. When you use them consistently in a game, great. You know, as a player, that you can't rest during what would normally be very passive cinematics, or even during more active sequences. See God of War and Resident Evil 4 for games that I feel used this mechanic correctly.

The problem starts when a game has QTEs for the sole sake of catching a player off guard. It'a a gotcha. See the very end of Uncharted, or brief moments in the campaign of Battlefield 3.

I believe there's a place for QTE, especially when a game and its pacing are designed with this mechanic in mind. But when it's done wrong, or it's included just to add "spice" to a game's pacing (whatever that's supposed to mean), it is damn painful.

@CookieMonster: What are you talking about? I LOVED wandering in the jungle for half an hour because my jeep got shot up at a checkpoint that I had already cleared out 25 times. I'm now comfortable knowing that if I'm ever actually left for dead in a jungle somewhere I'll be able to use a map to walk in a general direction until a blip informs me that diamonds are nearby. Seriously though, I liked Far Cry 2 a lot...but I can totally understand why people hate it.

Scrolling text instead of voice acting. Text is fine if you can see it all at once and click through it at your own face. But buttoning through one line after another--uh uh.

I hate mashing a button for five seconds to open a door/chest. Doubly so if it's failable. That's not fun or engaging. Just open the stupid chest. And don't make that a 5 second animation.

@DFSVegas said:

Jeez, I actually like most of the stuff mentioned in this thread.

Are we talking about bad mechanics, or mechanics that have been poorly implemented in the games one's played? I've see pretty much everything here used well at some point.

Well its mostly opinion, just what you think is a terrible game mechanic and gaming would be better without.

@gamefreak9: Well, I guess my answer is nothing then. I could name a few games that had crappy mechanics, but not with out also thinking of a game that used said mechanic really well.

I don't think there's really anything that's still being done that's out right bad no matter how you use it.

Even quick time events don't seem inherently bad to me. It just seems hard to make that a compelling mode of action. I think it can be done though.

I guess it's not in a lot of games, but it has been adopted and used in more games than one, I hate when items break, like swords and stuff. That sucks.

Unskippable cutscenes.