What is your biggest pet peeve when it comes to gaming? What mechanic, though once a hallmark of innovative design, has become so cheapened and hackneyed that you just want to gouge your ears everytime you hear it listed as a feature? Maybe it's not gameplay-related at all, anything you can think of the bothers you.
Mine is a light/dark morality system. I remember the marketing lead-up to the release of the original Fable, I was so excited. I could play as that child-murdering, greedy, devil-horned bastard I always wanted to be. Now, it all seems like more smoke-and-mirrors developer bullshit to try and convince me I'm not playing a game. How ironic that something designed to take things in to real-world territory ended up being the biggest gaming cliche.
Worst Gameplay Convention?
Yeah, I'll have to agree with you on that one. It was really cool for a little while, but they use the same thing over and over again. Maybe if they do some overhaul that freshens the whole morality system, like maybe have it actually have a real effect on gameplay, then it'd be awesome again.
It's a silly pet peeve but I find games that map multiple functions/actions to one button a little patronising. Batman manages it better than others but still, Run=A button, Jump=A button, Climb=A button, Dive=A button, Dodge=A button, Talk to this random dude=A button, Pull level=A button, Pick shit up=A button, yet skip Cut Scene=B button? I realise it's for simplicity but it's feels like the developers thought traversing their world might be difficult if I had to comprehend pressing two buttons instead of one.
QTEs, time limits, instant deaths, automatic scrolling (except in SHMUPs) and unskippable cutscenes.
That being said, some originality wouldn't hurt.
Gameplay: Respawning enemies. Far Cry 2: respawning guard posts for the entire game. Call of Duty 4: Endlessly respawning terrorists until you cross an invisible threshold. Aquaria: An area completely repopulates the moment you leave it. Mega Man: Every room (screen) repopulates the moment you leave it. Ninja Gaiden: enemies continuously respawn if their respawn point is just off screen. Serious Sam: enemies just fall out of the fucking sky, they don't disguise it at all.
Non-Gameplay: Bad save systems. It's rare that a game does this correctly. The most current examples I have are in Mass Effect 2. 1. I had just fought a whole bunch of enemies - several waves across several rooms - afterward I entered a room and talked to an important person. The game did not autosave or checkpoint here. It should. There is no good reason for it to not save. I quicksaved. Quicksave is great, except there is only ONE quicksave slot in that game. A quicksave system should cycle through at least 3 quicksaves slots, that way if you accidentally quicksave at a bad time, you don't have to restart the hour long mission in a game that doesn't like to autosave at important times and after battles. Bad save systems. I hate them. I am a save system snob.
Filler sequences. Most games are guilty to some degree of pitting you up against legions of trivial and or uninteresting enemies and challenges for the purpose of arbitrarily increasing a games length. E.g. Random battles, repetitive minigames, reasonless traversal, necessary grinding, etc.
" Open world games with nothing to do inside the world. Also, would it hurt the developers to put the ability to go straight to a mission instead of driving across the map to start? "I think being able to quick travel to locations you've already visited is enough, if you could instatly travel to your destination every time it will probably end up ruining the experience.
" World of Warcraft clones this trend in MMOs needs to die It doesnt have to copy WoW to be successful, look at EVE online for example. "One could say WoW is just a clone of the MMOs that came before it, like Ultima Online and Everquest. Tolkein-esque fantasy has been done to death though, so I agree if that's what you mean. The only reason WoW gets away with it is because it already has such a rich backstory established by 3 previous games and a talented team of writers.
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