The worst game mechanics?

    Hi all,

    There's a thread on another forum I frequent about peoples least favourite game mechanics and wondered what yours were.

    I'll start the ball rolling with infinitely respawning enemies until you pass a certain point.

    This really pisses me off in games since sometimes I like to sit back on the towns outskirts for example and snipe everyone rather than running in guns blazing. Now obviously if those enemies keep respawning until I actually walk through the gate on the other side of town then I'm obviously never going to progress and all those kills I just racked up I have to do again up close and personal.

    I'd much rather there be a set number of enemies in town and having the game allow me to approach the situation however I want.

    So what are your least favourite? Regenerating health? Experience points? Classes? QTE's?

    Personally : any QTE in any game. It's even worse if they are random (Hello Assassin's Creed III). It's even, even worse if you can't predic them, like when you rest during a cinematic and BOOM, a QTE kills you... during a cinematic. Currently, the only good QTE I saw was in Prince of persia : the two thrones. The QTE is related to an action key which is itself related to the weapon that you use. Also, the QTE is launched by you, not by the game (it's a QTE used to eliminate quickly a guard without fighting).

    Exemple (at 5:45) : http://youtu.be/dAQPxFryQGc?t=5m43s

    (This is the tutorial, so it's very slow)

    Yeah that QTE in PoP looks fine, since you know it's coming. Kind of like the reload mechanic in Gears of War where if you hit the reload button again whilst reloading at the right time you reload slightly faster and get a slight damage boost for that clip. If you messed up you jammed the gun.

    Shenmue is one of my favourite games and that is full of QTE's. But the game was slower paced than most and you kind of knew most of them were coming. The ones that weren't so obvious rarely had negative consequences, they just opened up new dialogue options and different branches in the story. I felt that worked since it kind of reinforced the games world, where random things could happen.

    But QTE's in most games are handled badly and really don't fit like you said. They're just bolted on to make cinematics more "engaging" when in reality they just ruin it or are totally unexpected/undesired.

    Quote from Froyok

    the only good QTE I saw was in Prince of persia : the two thrones [...] the QTE is launched by you, not by the game (it's a QTE used to eliminate quickly a guard without fighting)

    Yeah, that is really a great implementation.

    As most people i too do hate QTEs, but I have to say that, despite all my swearing while playing it, looking back I like the system that was used in The Indigo Profecy/Fahrenheit... after a while you got used to it, it actually made sense because actions where like mapped on what you had to do (like dodging a car). Unfortunately sequences were just too long and repetetive, giving the feeling of those video-games played over the phone during a tv-show.

    I think that in the end it's a matter of context.

    Perhaps I'm just old school but I really hate that all the corpses magically disappear in most modern games. I like to have a moment and look back to carnage I caused.

    Sprony, that's not a mechanic, that's a performance thing.

    I'm also not a fan of QTE's, at least when they are not done right, for example, AC3 and The force Unleashed games.

    Unskippable intro tutorials can be annoying too, I hate em, but they are needed most of the time. I've done a bunch of work to try and make this stuff clear but more systemic. New players really suck at learning game mechanics. Its hilarious how hard it is to even get a player to learn how to take cover for example.

    Quote from Dark

    Sprony, that's not a mechanic, that's a performance thing.

    I'm also not a fan of QTE's, at least when they are not done right, for example, AC3 and The force Unleashed games.

    Unskippable intro tutorials can be annoying too, I hate em, but they are needed most of the time. I've done a bunch of work to try and make this stuff clear but more systemic. New players really suck at learning game mechanics. Its hilarious how hard it is to even get a player to learn how to take cover for example.

    Just because it has to do with performance doesn't mean it's not an mechanic. There are more examples in which both are effected like the locking of doors behind you.

    Bloody screen so real, health regen, ironisghts in everything - but I guess those really aren't much of a mechanic but I'm bored to death of them, press x not to die

    Whats worse than unskippable cinematics is unskippable intros for the game. Sat there for over a minute watching some spinning logo explode into fire or something.

    Quote from D3ads

    Doors that lock behind you even though you just walked through them without any trouble (yes Max Payne 3, I'm looking at you)

    Yeah that caught me out a few times, especially with the golden gun parts. I'd often see a split route and go explore one direction intending to go back and explore the other, only to be greeted by a locked door since I had progressed too far. X(

    Quote from dux

    Bloody screen so real, health regen,

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/AmivkoB.jpg]

    I despise games with save checkpoints just before 10 MINUTE LONG UNSKIPPABLE CUT SCENES.

    Yes. I'm looking at you Paper Mario 2. It had a 10 minute long cut scene just before the final boss. If you die, you had to rewatch the WHOLE FUCKING THING. I must of watched that cutscene about 30 or so times before I was able to finally beat the bastard.

    Quote from Psy

    I despise games with save checkpoints just before 10 MINUTE LONG UNSKIPPABLE CUT SCENES.

    Yes. I'm looking at you Paper Mario 2. It had a 10 minute long cut scene just before the final boss. If you die, you had to rewatch the WHOLE FUCKING THING. I must of watched that cutscene about 30 or so times before I was able to finally beat the bastard.

    Yeah that's horrible.

    Alternatively, cut scenes without basic controls are very annoying, especially in this day and age. For example, pause or skip. Sometimes I have to leave the game for a second in the middle of a cut scene. It'd be nice if I could pause it so I don't miss anything.

    Quote from SpronyvanJohnson

    Just because it has to do with performance doesn't mean it's not an mechanic. There are more examples in which both are effected like the locking of doors behind you.

    Both of these are performance/progression tricks, why else would they be used? Its to either lock players in so they cant fuck up the game, or becase stuff behind the player must be unloaded, etc. Yes they both suck, I agree.

    I think bodies disappearing can be a mechanic. A perfect example is Deus Ex: Human Revolution. In that game, bodies will literally persist in the world indefinitely — you can return to somewhere 10+ hours later and that body is still there, and at any time it could be discovered and an alarm raised. So in that respect, the body remaining in place instead of vanishing is definitely a gameplay mechanic.

    IMO it would be better if more games left bodies in the world, and had enemies and NPCs alike react to them. Why do enemies not react in any way to seeing legions of their comrades lying in a bloody heap in the floor in something like Call of Duty? Why don't they run away in fear when they see that you're laying waste to them like ants? I know games like Far Cry tackle this issue, but many games don't bother or if they do it's a token "Oh a dead body! Now I'll go back to walking backwards and forwards forever."

    I know it's been said before, but better AI is what I want to see during the next generation. With more computing power than ever available, that means there's a lot more possibility to have enemies react in very clever and surprising ways. It's very rarely a game's AI genuinely surprises me, like when I first played FEAR and they were crawling along the floor and shit. If most games shun such innovations for the sake of even prettier graphics I will be so disappointed.

    Ok Thrik, what you described is a mechanic, but bodies disappearing when they serve no gameplay purpose, its for performance reasons, thats all I am saying. If you want gameplay situations for bodies, such as alarm/drag/hide/rape, etc than yes they are mechanics It really depends on the game tbh.

    no quick save, health regen, overuse of screen effects and cut scenes breaking stuff up all the time are defo my most disliked modern game trends. Oh yeah and lots of small DLC's rather than a meaningful expansion pack and achievements I really don't give a crap about (I know this seems to be popular somehow)

    I don't like it when games take away the possibility to interact with them.

    So when I start a game for the first time and I have to watch 10 minutes of bad cutscenes wiith crappy dialogoue, and a huge wall of text, I usually tend to not like that.

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