Mine would be arbitrarily slowing down a character to maintain horror in a game. I get if there are reasons like age, injury, or location that could provide context, but don't turn my legs into molasses because you need to time the jump scare just right.
RPG's with very vague abbreviated dialogue options that gives a complete line that might be entirely different from what you were expecting. Also, the three options of Yes, sarcastic Yes and No need to stop.
I would be happy to never have voice acting in an RPG ever again if it meant getting proper cRPG dialogue in them. I remember replaying KOTOR and attacking slavers and being treated like a bad guy for doing it, and I just really wanted an option to explain to Jolee that he was a piece of shit and that the Wookies deserved to be free.
Yeah, the excuse is something like "when those guys don't report in they'll send even more people in to replace them and punish the Wookiees for their deaths. Okay, sure. Logic works, I suppose.
But Jolee, my man. My plan is literally to overthrow the current regime. There isn't going to be anyone left to punish them.
:doubt: https://youtu.be/DmvSieBFPNM
Not exactly an RPG, but the line comes so far out of left field.
Oh yeah. Recent Bioware games are terrible about that.
I'm just trying to be nice and I surrender or try to set boundaries and end up stabbing a guy in the face.
maybe this is too broad, but I hate any sort of ludonarrative dissonance. I really hate when a story has my character get captured despite just beating up 12 guys in the previous room with no problem. I hate when a cutscene mysteriously disarms my character.
It goes the other way too. If the game is an FPS where I kill hundreds of people, but in the cutscenes I'm just a normal person, I hate it. I play most games like some kind of kleptomaniac pack rat, finding ever possible little morsel of resources that I can find and stuffing them in my goodies sack, but then my character talks and is super suave and cool. Nah. Lots of games have good harmony between gameplay/story. Undertale, recent Doom games, Hades, Disco Elysium, lots of others.
Saints Row is a fantastic series that is fully aware the player will be a wanton mass murderer and makes no excuses for it
Papers, Please is probably my all time favorite game in the way that gameplay and story are perfectly in sync
When you have to follow an NPC for a mission and they walk way slower than you do. So you end up just sitting there tapping W every few seconds like an asshole.
Crafting. Just chuck all that shit in the garbage
It really got annoying when they decided to put it into every single game seemingly because some marketing team decided their game needed it too.
Like did the Last of Us really benefit from having a crafting system?
The only game I can think of where the crafting adds anything is Tarkov. Building a gun with a ton of different parts is interesting and actually adds to the game.
Sorry, I read that as "Make me sell my copy." I'm also pretty high :stalin-smokin:
Ah fair enough. Some 11 year old got it as a birthday present and they have plenty of patience for tedium in games
I really hate how it's infected the way characters talk in game. No one says "craft a knife holster" or whatever in real life, yet this terminology just permeates at least one interaction you'll have. "Collect resources and craft some equipment for your journey" my mentor says to me. Yeah, no one talks like this and it's not cute like in Metal Gear when the Colonel tells you to push the X button. It just pushes me away from the whole thing.
I'm okay with it, but I think they need to streamline things a little better. Fewer animations and bulk making items. Maybe a separate item section for ingredients to reduce clutter and a marker to show which are items to sell vs those that are useful later.
But all that's over complicating a tedious part of many games.
Unless it's Minecraft lol. Because you can actually craft useful things like doors or buckets, and you can use the same resources for many things. Lots of crafting systems don't even use resources in interesting ways. It's just an alternative currency. They're icons in a menu. In Minecraft you can place wood blocks or make them into sticks and stuff. And even a stick can be an interesting item if you put it in a picture frame or armor stand. It interacts with the world. Crafting doesn't belong in non-sandbox games. Linear story-games should just use Doom-like weapon unlocks and upgrades.
Hunger meters because no one ever seems to make them well. First you tend to have to eat like 12 eggs, 98 berries, and 6 slabs of meat to get back to full, but also you tend to end up getting so much food that its more of a chore than anything else.
as much as I love Pathologic, this one in particular grinds away at me. The main character should potentially be able to get by without eating for a few days at least, but starts to starve in less than one.
It could probably be excused by the whole supernatural plague thing, but it's still annoying.
Then again, Pathologic exists to make the player unhappy
hunger would make more sense as just a stamina mechanic in most games since the time frames to actually starve would be crazy. i think project zomboid (zombie survival rougelite RPG) had the only realistic one i ever saw since you can stay alive for years if you do well enough. you get hunger status and positive or negative weight gain. after long enough time, if your weight falls below a dangerous level it slowly chips away your maximum health until you starve. it can take an in game month or more depending on body weight.
I hate hunger mechanics because my brain confuses eating in game with eating irl and then I wind up trying to figure out why I'm so hungry afterward.
Fallout 76 did away with the negative effects of hunger and thirst a few updates ago. Now you just lose the benefits of being well-fed and quenched if you do get hungry.
Also, especially with certain mutations, the amount of food required to not go from 0-100% is very low.
Starting with literally nothing in survival multiplayer.
No fucking point other than wasting hours scavenging for even the most rudimentary self defense only to end up being target practice for a discord group.
oh god, I'm starting to hate crafting so much. It's just absolute tedium. Games from 20 years ago would have you collect like one, maybe two resources to upgrade your stuff. Often it was just some kind of money or it was its own little quest to go get the thing. Now you gotta collect 10 different types of gizmos and plants, then go find the crafting specialist, then you gotta go get the blueprint, then you can finally make the upgrade that lets you hold 5% more ammo. Cool.
I'm gonna be constantly jumping even if it's slower. it's the best.
live to jump.
Strafe-run b-hoppong in Quake and outrunning your own rockets.
The first time I played Skyrim I didn't know about fast travel until about 30 hours in. It was actually pretty fun that way, I should try it again. Lot more zen vibes, enjoying the soundtrack and sky, and random encounters on the road were fun. Only time I ever randomly ran into Cicero.
Skyrim at least has horses, carriages, and boats for fast travel alternatives. Try playing Oblivion where the only way to fastly travel is fast travel. Morrowind still has the best fast travel system that isn't fast travel though.
I liked that Fallout 4 had the teleporter and the vertibirds if you're playing without fast travel, like in survival mode.
Drip feeding progression in order to incentivize buying microtransactions.
consumable items (how am i supposed to know when a surprise boss fight happens?)
I'm a fan of games that put an expiration date on consumables, or letting me know that the items I have are low level next to the ones I'll get later (e.g. if I get a Small Potion of Healing I know there's probably gonna be large ones later). That sort of thing gets rid of the FOMO from using the consumables right away.
My Skyrim and Final Fantasy games had so many useless potions and poisons by the end.
Dragon Age Inquisition had its flaws, but at least they made acquiring and using items less stressful.
They only work in an actual survival game like Minecraft where you have to eat food, and even then, potions are kinda silly (but there are a bunch of cool ones like the speed boost, night vision, and fire resistance). I feel like most games just don't have a big enough loss from death to bother with them. Playing Witcher 3 and I've basically never used potions or whatever outside of required quest items. There's too many, they're too specific, and if you die you just reload a save and attack enemies in a different way. In other words, the only good consumables are ones that restore your health.
:thinky-felix: Me remembering Final Fantasy for the NES with 99 cabins in my inventory while paddling around a river in a canoe without sinking....
I've been playing the Demon's Souls remake after never playing the original and was absolutely floored it has a weight limit mechanic. Thank God Fromsoft never carried that over
Events based on real time. Time of day, seasonal, what have you. Outside of games where that's the whole point, it's just an artificial hurdle at best and abused for FOMO shit at worst.
ESO is pretty good about that in that they repeat the same prizes every year.
I loathe games where you can only get some item once, and the game is 10+ years old.
Random battles should be banned. Play any Pokemon game back to back with Let's Go Eevee/Pikachu, the ability to dodge random fights or selectively choose to engage something that you want to catch is so fucking nice, even if the rest of the game is exactly the same. Something the PC rerelases of Final Fantasy games have all added is a few cheats, the best of which by far is "no encounters" which still makes you fight the bosses but lets you just explore to your heart's content. I've been getting into speedrunning Deltarune lately, and successfully dodging each of the encounters without dropping your sprint speed by bumping into a wall is like 90% of the run.
It's just so much better than the older way of doing it that there's no comparison.
I like they way it works in Earthbound where monsters spawn randomly, but you can see them and either avoid them or try to hit them from behind for an opening move.
It was really cool to automatically win if you were sufficiently leveled.
Games where you aren't heavily and pointlessly taxed. I find Stardew valley too unrealistic that you are able to make exponential gains and not nearly stagnant into bankruptcy. Also most of your time should be wasted on maintenance for Joja. I don't see how you can would be able to have free time these days.
