Ask Lemmy

Anything requiring you repeatedly mash a single button super fast

Any game that forces snap to center cameras. No one should ever have to fight against the controls in a game.

(Looking at you No Man’s Sky)

You know when you are in the middle of a game's story and then you get caught or something wjd the enemy takes all your gear and you have to find your gear or fight to get it back? No screw that. So annoying.

And I'm the kind of player that does all sise quests before doing the main story so I can be OP and plow through the story. Just let me do that and don't take what I worked hard to get.

Escort Missions. Especially when pathfinding AI was terrible.

Quick Time Events in a game that it isn't the focus. Halo 4 had exactly two quick time events. One in the first level and one in the last level.

Roll and move. Skip your turn.

I thought about my answer, since many mechanics I don't like can have good implementations, or at the very least are a sort of lesser of two evils kind of thing.

What I can't stand are tactical or RPG games with realtime or turn based combat option toggles. I play many games with one or the other and enjoy them, but when I play a game with both that can be toggled in options I always feel like neither setting feels perfectly right. The balance is always off no matter what. Understandable with game devs having to double the amount of work for creating combat and tuning items and it ends up feeling a little soggy every time.

Ps1 Spider-Man having 3 bosses in a row at the end of the game.

I don't like durability mechanics when its clearly there just to waste your time or money or whatever. Any game that makes you do more hiking to repair benches than fighting is either getting a thumbs down or I'm going to download a mod.

Game has collectables scattered in almost every room including lore text and audio logs.

Meanwhile the story NPC is nagging you to move on every 30 seconds on a loop and won't shut the fuck up. Because play testing revealed most of their players are fucking morons and get lost in one way apartment rooms I guess.

These two mechanics conflct with one another way too often and it's immersion breaking every time.

Insert real world money to continue/for advantage. Whether it's modern FTP with MTX or old school quarter eaters, it's poison to games.

Not a mechanic i guess, but motion blur

Escort missions. Specifically when the person you are escorting is as sharp as a bag of hammers.

Microtransactions - the answer always has been and always will be microtransactions.

Unskippable intro levels that teach the control mechanics.

Pay to win.

Permanently loosing a treasure that you can only get once because your pocket is full.

QTE, especially when they're randomly inserted into an otherwise action/skill based game.

Something that hasn't been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay...

Case in point, unmodded Skyrim's legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation'd...)

Very few checkpoints or save options. I don’t have time to try to beat something if there is like 20 mins of playtime from the last checkpoint.

Where one enemy sees you and now all their friends somehow knows where you are

Stat/EXP loss on death.

Unskippable cut scenes, especially before a boss. I want to play on hard difficulty, which means I WILL die to bosses. Do not force me to watch that shit 5+ times or I'm out like trout.

• Games with designated save points only.
• Skill/Tech trees that really only have one viable path.
• Games that reward stealth until the boss battle.

Probably encumberance, almost certainly the single most ignored rule in rpgs.

But honorable mention goes to old school AC/THAC0 - the mechanics were originally for modern-era battleship game where armor class referred to size. Using the smallness of boats to model the defensive power of better armor was never going to produce sensible results. THAC0 was always unweildy at the table, slowed play, and turned combat into a chorus of "uggghhhh does a 13 hit?" "Ugh.... no."

Timer that can be skipped with paid currency.

The worst game mechanic is artificial difficulty where enemies aren't challenging. Instead, they are just damage sponges.

I don't think that I can give the worst, but I can give some that I did not enjoy.

• Invisible teleporters. Some old RPGs

like the D&D Gold Box games

came without an auto-mapping feature. Part of the game was, as one played along, manually creating a map on graph paper. This in-and-of-itself was somewhat time-consuming, and if one made a mistake or got turned around, it could be hard to fix one's map. A particularly obnoxious feature to complicate this was that sometimes, there'd be unmarked teleporters to move you to another place on the map without notice, and you had to figure out that this had happened. Very annoying. I didn't like this mechanic.

• Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature. Some strategy games do this. The idea here is to force you to think in real time, and not permit you to just pause and think about things. Problem is, even if one agrees with this, in the real world, sometimes you need to answer the door or use the toilet. Not a good idea.

• In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one's precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There's some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don't think that it's necessary

a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don't really like situations where it's just added for the sake of being there.