Ask Lemmy

Missable or multiplayer-only achievements. Or the ones that force you to replay the game.

Ghost of Yōtei is doing it well. Everything is available at all times after the main story is completed in a single game. I could think of a few possible achievements they could have created that would be missable but I'm glad they didn't.

GTA5 has a lot of multiplayer achievements I could never get because I hate GTA Online.

Talos Principle 2 has at least two achievement that each needs a replay to the end and you have to follow a specific path of talking to characters that you don't know upfront if you're not looking online for it. So if you're trying this without a guide you might end up replaying it more than twice. That's shitty.

press ▲ to jump. shit button. it's x.

Not the worst, but I'm annoyed by invisible walls. Just give me a reason why I can't be there.

Holding a button to do anything/everything. I can see the logic of where it may be useful, but it doesn't need to be used for everything. So damn annoying.

*Oh, and similarly, forcing excessive submenus to do basic things, like continue a save from the main menu. That should be one, maybe two button presses, not 4+ along with a confirmation. I'll never understand games with stuff like that.

Deliberately ableist bullshit. Like no pause or an over reliance on quick time events.

Progression systems that draw attention away from the core gameplay loop

Examples are season passes, archivements, minigames that took longer too complete then the main game

QTE

Invite your friends for "bonus" resources, or even worse, to unlock progression.

If you want to incentivize me to growthhack your product, let's talk dollars, not Mystic Sunshine Gems.

Poorly done procedural generation where it's a waste of time to explore. The first Remnant was pretty bad about this, with small setpieces scattered throughout the levels that looked interesting but usually only contained basic enemies and one or two empty pots. Filling out the map was a chore that was almost never worth the effort - almost never because sometimes there was a unique drop hidden in a level just to screw over anyone who got sick of fighting through hundreds of empty buildings and decided to stick to the main path.

Health as a resource

MTX for customisation

Microtransactions

Survival crafting. I spend my real life days trying to keep up on sheltering and feeding myself. I don’t want to “relax” by punching trees to make a fire to cook a bird I punched to death.

The pervasiveness of this in every game has limited the content I engage with the last 10 or so years. Everyone started chasing that Minecraft money and now it’s Ubi-fied into just about every mainstream title.

I don’t want to forge new weapons. I want to find them in a chest or earn them by killing a boss. I have bounced off of so many games the moment they ask me to learn a system of crafting. Keep that in it’s own genre and stop padding games out with repetitive busy work.

Souls. The clumsy roll and artificial difficulty spikes and losing all your shit because you didn’t do it all “just right” for the entire encounter.

Ugh.

EDIT: Honorable mention . . . Timers. I’m looking at you, current Bungie.

Hold w to crawl forward

When someone dies in Mario multiplayer there's a short pause in the gameplay. It really fucks up everyone else's timing.

One of the worst game mechanics ever found in a game was where the enemy got harder as you gained levels. The same enemy. It basically defeated the value of having more levels. I think it was Oblivion ~~Skyrim~~ where I found this, particularly annoying.

No natural health/mana regeneration. I hate games where you need potions to survive or are limited in your spell usage just because you do not enough mana which was finished earlier.

Europa Universalis 4 forced historical events while also advertising it as a sandbox. For example: no matter how stable you are as netherlands. As soon as you end your golden age your country will go into a civil war that if you have collonies you can barely get out of. Because "well it was in history like that"

Not really the worst, but my hot take of something I don't like: puzzles rather than problems. By that I mean puzzles have one correct solution and everything else is wrong and doesn't work, while with a problem you're given some tools and an obstacle and just let loose. It's so much more satisfying to find your own solution that it is to reach the end and realize you were being sneakily handheld through it to make sure you found the only possible way through. I've done a few good problems where I reach the end, then immediately reload the save from before and try some different routes just to see if it works.

Puzzles do have their place though, especially in tutorials.