What do you consider to be the most annoying game mechanic?

This can be for any genre of video game.

I have always found stun mechanics to be insanely infuriating to fight against, especially if the game you're playing, or the play style you're using heavily relies on movement. I'm somewhat fine when they slightly slow you down, but when they put you at a complete stop, that's enough for me to become an absolute faucet of fury.

1 hour ago, Idiotinfrontofadesk said:

I have always found stun mechanics to be insanely infuriating to fight against, especially if the game you're playing, or the play style you're using heavily relies on movement

I feel the same, especially regarding 3rd person games. I don't mean how like in GTA IV when you're drunk and you're staggering around, or like in Skyrim when you're over encumbered, or even like in Death Stranding and you're close to your carry weight limit. That all makes sense based on the context of the moment in the game. I hated how in Mass Effect 3 when you have the couple of sequences where Shepard is following the child and the game forces you in to having extremely limited movement. That absolutely infuriates me and just makes me want to turn the game off instantly.

44 minutes ago, Biodegradable said:

I've never been a fan of Regenerating Health as I feel it removes tension and breaks the pace of gameplay. Rather than becoming a daring challenge on low health, forcing to change tactics in a desperate attempt to find more, all you have to do is sit behind a box for a few seconds and suck your thumb while your wounds heal. LAME.

Generally speaking, I am also not a fan of regenerating health as it means that level designers can get lazy when it comes to combat encounters and force players to rely too much on cover to survive.

However, there are a few cases of games where I wish this feature actually existed. I was recently playing MOHAA and there is a sniper town mission where there are dozens of snipers in extremely well hidden spots. If you are playing that mission without foreknowledge, you have very little chance to make it through without savescumming, even on easy difficulty.

I don't know if it necessarily counts as a mechanic, but motion blur can eat my bootyhole

2 hours ago, Biodegradable said:

I've never been a fan of Regenerating Health as I feel it removes tension and breaks the pace of gameplay. Rather than becoming a daring challenge on low health, forcing you to change tactics in a desperate attempt to find more, all you have to do is sit behind a box for a few seconds and suck your thumb while your wounds heal. LAME.

There's a YT channel Super Bunnyhop that I thought described it well - regeneration encourages "stop n pop" gameplay whereas the need to actively search for health encourages "run n gun". While I know some people prefer that stop n pop stuff, Doom is all about runnin from evil

Maybe too broad to be a "mechanic", but I hate roguelikes. Let's say I hate all Roguelike mechanics.

To me a game without structure might as well be a movie without a script or coherent editing, there's just no meaning to it. I guess the only case I find it somewhat acceptable is if it's card or boardgame based, as well, those generally do work on randomised mechanics, and I have to excuse my 200 hours on Slay the Spire somehow :P

But in other game types all it means is I completely lose interest well before I get anywhere, like with Hades. I mean they tried, they tried to include a story, they tried to include plot development and characters, and all of that stuff is fine but the gameplay got painfully dull to me before I ever finished it even once. I mean the idea of the genre is to try to enhance replayability but frankly it only hurts playability for me. Hell as a rule I find well structured things that I like to be replayable, because I guess I just like going through motions if I think they're well constructed motions. 

Only stun mechanics come to mind right now, it's fun to stun an enemy with a strong attack, but the reverse is usually nowhere near as fun... Reminds me of Doom 3's screen shake when the player was taking damage...

I was initially going to say regen health too, but this is mainly somewhat cheap in pure FPSes to me, and even there, it depends. I wish some FPS/RPG hybrids incorporated it, because it can make things quite punishing sometimes, with no health around, out of medkits, etc.

Stealth, fuck that shit lol, nothing fun about crawling slowly for 38 hours and dying quickly for the tiniest fuck-ups...unless you're Assassin's Creed, it's tolerable there at least since you don't die in 1 or 2 hits and can break line of sight easily.

Random reaction time:

I speedrun Hotline Miami on twitch, and we have a joke in the speedrunning Discord that the game is just bad and broken, and i swear to god, the reaction time is just so bullshit, the enemies are not consistent at all, sometimes they instantly see you and shoot you but other times they take ages to notice you, sometimes they hear your gunshots but some other times they don't, thank god Hotline Miami 2 fixed it (together with countless other broken things), the editor campaigns would have been a pain if it was still in.

2 minutes ago, sluggard said:

Stealth, fuck that shit lol, nothing fun about crawling slowly for 38 hours and dying quickly for the tiniest fuck-ups...unless you're Assassin's Creed, it's tolerable there at least.

As someone who's ghosted Splinter Cell 1-3, git gud scrub :P

I will say though a lot of games attempt stealth when they have no business doing so and they do it fucking badly, see Last of Us, The for a major example of that. 

Also they were good but people perhaps lionise Thief 1 and 2 a bit too much in the stealth genre. They were massively important for sure but I eh... I don't think they're all that fun to play now really. And I don't think there's been many great stealth games in a long time, I think only the revival of the stealth strategy games in Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3 and Klei's Mark of the Ninja do it great now. I don't even really like the new Hitman games much. 

3 hours ago, Biodegradable said:

I've never been a fan of Regenerating Health as I feel it removes tension and breaks the pace of gameplay. Rather than becoming a daring challenge on low health, forcing you to change tactics in a desperate attempt to find more, all you have to do is sit behind a box for a few seconds and suck your thumb while your wounds heal. LAME.

I agree with that. When we were playing Unreal Tournament, they'd usually add the regenerating mutators. I was never a fan of it, but others would be like "But I'll be running with 2% health like a sitting duck, it's unfair!". And then I'd be "I am shooting you, shooting you, shooting you and you almost don't die, then you escape and come back when health is full, what's the point?". It's even lame in single player games too anyway, no thrill of running scared with almost no health till you bump into an area with health packs or something.

A few from mine:

- Pointless lives system. That's when you can collect lives and lose a live when you die, BUT you can still save and reload game anywhere at any time anyway. I would always save and reload game whenever I can, instead of spending 10 minutes playing a level, dying just near exit, and replaying whole level again (and repeating this even more times = no fun at all). In such case, finding or being awarded with extra lives feels extremely UNDERWHELMING and POINTLESS. It can be only fun when you consider lives as a "collectible score" without any other purpose. Typical examples: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad (fortunately this kind of mechanics disappeared from later games). Better if a game offers you an option to directly reload last saved game after you die, or implements a checkpoint system.

- "Score-Halving" punishment for a failure or death. That's when you collect any form of currency (score, money etc.) and you lose HALF of the amount when you die or fail. This is so much extreme and discouraging punishment, imagine I spend many hours playing and collecting all this money, and lose half instantly due to just a single stupid failure. When something like this happens to me, I quit the game or reload the state before death (if possible). Typical examples: Grand Theft Auto (score multiplier you receive for completing a mission), earlier Pokémon games. Better if you receive more adequate punishment which won't discourage you from further playing.

- Degenerating health above 100 in Quake. Forcing me to rush through the enemies and taking more damage to make "actual use" of the extra health. I'm not this kind of aggressive player.

2 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Doom is all about runnin toward* evil

Your credit card.

1 hour ago, hybridial said:

 As someone who's ghosted Splinter Cell 1-3,

Metal Gear Solid has stealth as well, remember? :D

Duke Nukem Forever is another example of regen health. While I agree that regen health doesn't work as intended, escort missions can go to hell. That annoys me the most overall.

35 minutes ago, Hisymak said:

Degenerating health above 100 in Quake

And in Quake 2 as well. Funnily enough, armor doesn't decrease the amount over time....well, except if you pick up all the adrenaline items scattered in the secret areas, which increases the max health by 1 point...

4 minutes ago, leodoom85 said:

Metal Gear Solid has stealth as well, remember? :D

Yes, best in Metal Gear SOlid 3 which was easilly one of the best games I ever played and... it actually featured a lot of mechanics unique to it in its series and honestly even to gaming in general that have never been tried since, which is a shame because everything in that game worked really well. A masterpiece. 

Let's see.. I won't sugar coat mine as I fucking hate some mechanics:

1) AOE stunlocks \ Hold spells where the counters are single target or casting some stupid spell that takes a year to come off. Super fucking boring to have a full group of heroes stunned by some stupid mind flayer or low level mage and then poked to death by their stupid attacks that now never miss and ignore armor. I mention hold spells because they usually last a damn eternity.

2) Blur \ Evasion working on AoE spells.

3) Life steal \ fast regeneration : If you can heal faster than things can damage you then the game balancing is garbage. Bonus point if they are high enough that you will never die to anything but instakill crits. Exception if they are a limited use item\spell with counters. Extra bonus points if the regeneration is instant max hp every few seconds on an enemy.

4) Death spells. No I don't care if there is a million dice roll to decide if it works it is still stupid bs.

5) You meet the stupid ass unique skeleton that is immune to lightning, fire, ice, status effects, poison and physical damage. redirects magical attacks, has full hp regen every 5 seconds. Only attack it has is a sword slash that stunlocks you and deals no damage because you have regen. No loading allowed mid fight.

2 hours ago, hybridial said:

To me a game without structure might as well be a movie without a script or coherent editing, there's just no meaning to it. I guess the only case I find it somewhat acceptable is if it's card or boardgame based, as well, those generally do work on randomised mechanics, and I have to excuse my 200 hours on Slay the Spire somehow :P. 

I am kind of the opposite - I am not a fan of elaborate story. I used to read books, but not that much. I would be fine with some quick crazy adventures, but no Lord of the Rings; I find established universes to be boring more often than not, and it is difficult to entice me with that kinda stuff. I guess that's why I like those more straight-forward games risen from eras gone by. Say for example, in Unreal Tournament, there's clearly all that stuff going on in the background, what with the advanced technology (depicted in a non-humanitarian way, although Deus Ex is more upfront about the human suffering lol), the flying cars, and each level having its own cute little backstory (DM-Morpheus was a bunch of mega tall towers, spacescrapers or something, and Liandri bought them to make a combat arena or something; DM-Stalwart was a bankrupt auto-parts workshop that they bought out; etc etc), but that makes little difference in the actual gameplay.

Same for roguelikes, sort of. Sure, there are some mechanics that might have story behind them, like "why does engraving Elbereth repels monsters in NetHack?", but it tends to be fun. It is highly emergent gameplay, but I think that's what a roguelike is all about. And what newer roguelikes aren't all that much about, sadly. Newer games tend to have a more tightly controlled gameplay. *weep*

Kwik-E-Time Events

21 minutes ago, Gustavo6046 said:

I am kind of the opposite - I am not a fan of elaborate story.

That's not exactly what I meant, I used the comparison on the basis of structure and form. What I mean is I like the gameplay experience to be designed and planned out, essentially the things that are the major job of someone like a John Romero, someone who takes the assets of the game and builds a "story" out of it, in the language of gameplay experience. Level design, encounter design, game balance and progression, these are things I prefer to be static but designed for maximum quality. Randomising them just leads to less interesting experiences in general the way I see it. 

FarCry's stamina mechanic is horrible, runs out far too quickly and with the scale of some of the levels, it really doesn't do me good. And the stamina gets used while jumping, just what?

getting stunned, blurred vision, whatever keeps one from fighting back effectively. combine this with renerating health for boring gameplay, and you get a recipe for rage quitting.

Whatever the hell happens at the end of Project IGI. It's like a perfect storm of annoying tropes.

The game is basically a first person sneaker, think Thief with guns. Most of the time you're skulking around some outdoor military base, picking off enemies one by one without triggering alerts, because they lead to infinite enemy spawns. Good stuff mostly, measured pace, sometimes a forced adrenaline segment, just the works.

Then the last mission happens: an underground bunker complex made of "beginner doom architecture" - square room, narrow connecting hallway, square room, etc. No more sneaking around allowed, your only option is to clean the room as you enter it. This is made funner by virtue of all enemies being specnaz soldiers, elites with the most powerful guns and very quick reactions. Better brush off that twitch reflex, soldier. The mission takes perhaps 20 minutes or so? Then you arrive to the grand finale.

Your lovely hacker sidekick needs to disarm an atomic bomb sitting in the middle of a large open room, so it's a fixed-time scripted event. Enemies stream into the room from multiple entry points around the room, on several height levels (there are walkways around the walls and such). They're primarily interested in killing your fragile stationary sidekick, but won't hesitate to damage you as well. They're of the specnaz variety, so they're fast and lethal. You get some item spawns around the room, but it just makes the scenario more frustrating, because it means an extra layer of management to keep track of.

Then, when you inevitably make a wrong split-second decision or don't remember the spawn sequence by heart, you fail the mission... and have to repeat it from start. Have I mentioned IGI didn't have ingame saves? Oh, sorry! It's such a great mechanism to build up tension in a slowburn "tactical" sneaker game... it's the exact opposite in a twitch skill contest capped by an unforgiving memory test.

I never completed the segment and just watched the outro FMV by playing the video file on the CD, because I got sick of repeating the 20min whack-a-specnaz segment ad nauseam, only to get one pop at a merciless invasion segment that requires memorizing the enemy spawn pattern via many, many repeat attempts.

Not a mechanic exactly but there is nothing more i hate in games, and that is excessive player animations, you know the kind that get in the way of gameplay, the kind that really makes the game feel more stiff, sloppy or unresponsive. I'm not saying all player animations are bad only the kinds that i described

Other ones would be:

-exccessive player damage indication, or not enough.

-unskippable cutscenes

-Overly frequent cutscenes

-Overly long cutscenes

-Pointless upgrade/game mechanics that doesn't add anything to the gameplay.

Idk why it seems that every game needs to have more depth than they actually have, maybe it's just a modern gaming trend.

Little bit outside of the original question but hopefully not too much

1 hour ago, hybridial said:

What I mean is I like the gameplay experience to be designed and planned out, essentially the things that are the major job of someone like a John Romero, someone who takes the assets of the game and builds a "story" out of it, in the language of gameplay experience.

I just like fun situations that derive out of basic rules. I don't mind if they don't make that much sense when it comes to game design. Game design is very overthought nowadays, and it's nice to have a casual break from making sense sometimes. I am a silly person, I would be qualified to say!

I mean, to be fair, recent game design also prevents some nasty kinds of bullshit, like stupid escort missions. So I think I meant more as in too much abstract thought. There's a difference between "this level is too draggy, maybe change it up a bit so it's less of an escort and more of a tower defense or something" and "the reward cycle is too tight, we cannot change boss monster #291's number of attacks or we may lose the interest of the player's ego and superego!"

You still sound confusing, though, and probably kind of abstract. Do you mean as in the mechanics working together or something? The orchestration, the "behind-the-scenes" (of the gameplay 'feel', not of game technicalities)? I like taking my gameplay experience at face value.

1. Roguelikes. It's not the 80's anymore, move on Grandpa. 

2. Health packs. Sorry but I don't see a thrill in running around a level for 5 minutes, killing the flow and my enjoyment simultaneously while I hump walls looking for a medikit. 

3. Worldbuilding/lore in collectible files. It's never interesting. 

4. Sniper sections in shooters. I don't think I've ever played a compelling sniper section, it's all just point-and-click tedium. 

37 minutes ago, Gustavo6046 said:

You still sound confusing, though, and probably kind of abstract. Do you mean as in the mechanics working together or something? The orchestration, the "behind-the-scenes" (of the gameplay 'feel', not of game technicalities)? I like taking my gameplay experience at face value.

I think its fairly simple.

A bad level in Doom, isn't fun

A good level, is. 

Crafting a good level is to me the real art of actually making Doom fun because as good as the mechanics are in the game, they can become tedious in a poor level. I just extrapolate that concept to other kinds of games. I mean my issue with most modern games is a lack of imagination in the game design element, because they play everything absurdly safe copying what everyone else is doing, game design now feels like completing a checklist. Especially in the open world games which I don't tend to like much anymore. And a lot of sub genres have just disappeared or almost have now, no one really makes ambitious stealth games anymore, survival horror in the style I liked most hasn't really been done much outside of a game called Remothered that I did like. Instead everything is some kind of game as service online abomination, an ARPG hybrid FPS or an open world game done to either the Ubi Soft or Rockstar checkboxes. Nintendo stopped making anything ambitious at all and did the open world thing with Zelda about 5 years after it would have had any novelty at all. 

1 hour ago, Matias said:

 

-unskippable cutscenes

 

thanks for mentioning that. disgusting.

One I hate enough is QTEs, especially in some modern AAA games, where the game can suddenly take control and show some cinematic (that can definitely impress new gamers but not me) and present you with a button to mash. Among with many linear action/FPS where they just have to make the game seem more like a scripted movie than a world you can interact freely. And why force me to react fast and press the button and possibly miss it and watch the same thing again, take me away from one style of game and suddenly throw me to a totally different scripted thing? I'd prefer if I'd just seen the cinematic experience without having to be too quick to press a random button at that point.