Ask Lemmy

Unskippable cutscenes. Escort quests where I have to walk slowly.

Fishing

Since all the obvious answers have been covered, I'm gonna dig deep on a genre nobody but me even plays anymore anyway.

Character-based asymmetry in versus puzzle games. It's never been remotely balanced, and I don't believe it ever could be.

Suppose I put you in charge of developing a balance patch for Puyo Puyo Fever, Puzzle Bobble 3, Magical Drop, Meteos, etc, you could just name any other puzzle game that has this. What changes would you make? What changes could you even try to make?

If you look at something like a fighting game, characters have large movesets, and every move has a bunch of variables attached: startup, active, recovery, hitstun, damage, meter gain. Which means there's a lot of surface area for developers to adjust and fine-tune until the cast hopefully feels balanced enough. Even if they don't get it right on the first try, they can gather data from players and use that information to figure out what needs to be patched.

Puzzle games have little to no room to even try to do this. So when you try to give character choice a mechanical effect on gameplay, but they only do one thing like a dropset or garbage pattern, there are almost no meaningful buffs or nerfs that can be handed out when it turns out that Void Hole is kinda good and Skeleton T kinda isn't.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix famously tried, and, well, an attempt was made but it ultimately couldn't do all that much. The tiers got shuffled around slightly, but it's still Ken Fighter.

Health scaling as you level. Just ducking lazy.

"Here's a rare weapon dropped by this boss! But wait, you need to be at least level 30 to use it, and you're still on level 2."

I went out of my way to repeatedly grind and kill this late game boss during early game, just give me my reward for not following the stupid linear progression

Maybe not the worst, but I've been playing old RPGs and I really hate mandatory loss fights in late game or NG+. Radiata Stories was a fantastic game but I was bonkers powerful on my second playthrough yet somehow lost a fight to a humongous chud asshole for plot reasons. Rare misstep in that games story, honestly.

Best example of subversion of that trope, though,b was in Dragon Quest 11. If you know, you know, but I won't spoil that, lol.

Crafting. And jumping games.

Button-mashing events. (The Rapid-fire kind)

Archers interrupting your attacks. Fucking archers.

Enchant weapons/armor to +x%. It usually companies Pay2Win items that you can use to have a 100% chance of upgrading, or at least not breaking your armor.

Gambling.

How about the release broken game then finish the game way after release… if you’re lucky mechanic?

Puzzles that are entirely music based with no visual cues.

They're bad enough for me as just a guy with no rhythm or note recognition, but also just fuck deaf people I guess?

Fragile world-spanning deliveries.

Silksong has me screaming over them, 10 - 20 minutes of walking and one too many smacks at the end ruins it. And then there's the one that's also timed!

But to be fair, most of Silksong gets me yelling at the TV on the regular! I love it and hate it!