As most of us play games, we sometimes encounter elements or routines that suck all the fun from a shipped product. They can be a dealbreaker, so it’s better to be aware of them. I’d exclude platinum challenges and MTX as they are their own beasts, and start with a couple of examples I hated in older titles:
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NFS: Hot Pursuit (2010). Before and after you enter a race, there are motivational unskippable cutscenes about your rating and unlocked vehicles. Instead of inspiring me to play more, it felt like visiting the web without an adblocker. Although it plays nice on Linux and I liked how vehicles drive, I deleted it after a couple of hours.
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NFS: Underground. Besides a difficulty slider you have before every track, there’s a trend to make every other race longer. 6+ 1.5 minute laps become a chore and make you notice how broken and random it is under the hood. The strenght of the game in the short flashy arcade runs, but as devs couldn’t find any way to make it more difficult, they make it a useless test of endurance.
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TES: Skyrim. Lots of quests are built on a premise of making you explore the global map more without any means of transportation, unlike Morrowind. They probably assumed there’d be some, or that fast travel would solve this, but I remember this one time I was to take the head from the witch and this region was completely unexplored at that time, and there was no obvious way but going there by foot.
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CoD 2+. Replenishing health is a cool mechanic, but it isn’t followed by a repercussion for sitting and recharging. Finite number of enemies makes it trivial. I feel like something akin to WW2 southern front could’ve used the mechanic of endless onslaught before you complete the objective.
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FarCry. It’ve began as a tacticool shooter where you can choose where to start your infiltration, and it was good at that, but after introducing aliens it went weird. The latter levels are close-quarter skirmishes where only savescumming is a viable strategy. Game loses it’s primal value to scale the difficulty in a wrong way once again.
What’s your examples of wrong decisions?
This is a much smaller and more subjective answer than the (great) ones OP provided.
I was kicking around an enemy idea for my game, a spear-wielding knight that could poke you through walls. Well, I started playing Dead Cells recently and found basically that exact enemy in a later area. My immediate first thought upon getting poked from across a wall was “this sucks, I hate this”.
Bullet dodged!
That’s not small at all. You undid the failing concept that devs there couldn’t see or were too entangled with it to get rid of it. That’s really cool.
Wait, I have another one.
Half-assed, cargo-cult, implementations of D&D’s long rest mechanic.
D&D’s long rest mechanic, where you have very powerful resources that only recharge when you “rest” for a long time only barely works in the original tabletop game. Most players in that context don’t even play by the books recommendations, but instead go nova on their powers and then rest anyway. It kind of works if there is a strong narrative pressure that prevents you from taking weeks to address the problem. But it turns out players in video games kind of hate timers.
Pillars of Eternity 1 just whole ass cargo culted it into the game. There aren’t any actual timers because players hate them. You can only use your cool powers a few times before needing to use “camping supplies” or return to town. Your max health eventually stops recovering until you take a full rest.
So a full rest is probably significant, right? A serious tactical choice? No, not really. At worst, it’s several loading screens to go back to the inn, a “resting” animation, and then several loading screens to get back to where you were. There are no consequences. Enemies don’t respawn. Quests aren’t timed. It is extremely tedious.
Dark Souls has a sort of long-rest mechanic, in that your healing and spells only recharge when you hit a checkpoint, but that respawns most of the enemies. Now it’s more of a choice, and the game is built around “Can you get from here to there this your resources?” PoE1 didn’t do that. It just felt like someone liked D&D but didn’t really understand anything about it.
I was pleasant surprised they changed the game design to be the infinitely more reasonable per-encounter cadence in the sequel.
Side note: There’s a difference between good and fun. Many players probably had fun with the d&d-like system, but players and customers are notoriously idiots. “A faster horse” and all that. Would they have had more fun with a better designed system? Probably, unless the nostalgia of “long rest” was weighted really heavily in their mind.
At least BG3 had plot stuff happen when you long rest, but that creates a whole separate set of problems: If you are too good at the game and don’t need to rest often, you miss out on the plot stuff.
Gods, I’m so sick of D&D and how much influence it has.
Tedious optimal play is probably a whole book you could write.
I remember one old RPG where you got XP from reading books in the world. But if you went three menus deep, swapped on a particular accessory, exited three menus, then read the book, you’d get double the xp. What the fuck kind of choice is that? It was super tedious to do every time, and annoying to realize I was a level behind because I hadn’t been doing it.
I think this has mostly fallen out of fashion, but some games would have a “your benefits from leveling are determined by your stats at the time of level up.” So if you’re about to level, you better swap on as much +wis +con +int gear as you can, or you’ll be significantly under powered at the end of the game. Extremely tedious. Takes you out of the gameplay loop. Trash.
