The other thread about favorite mechanics is great, so let’s also do the opposite: what are some of your most hated mechanics?
The other thread about favorite mechanics is great, so let’s also do the opposite: what are some of your most hated mechanics?
For me, the absolute worst is when the game effectively punishes you for not constantly menu diving to change your equipment.
Some random examples:
Disco Elysium - your clothes have a MASSIVE effect on some specific stats which influence dialogues. In order to get the best outcomes, you have to change your clothes before an interaction with another character.
Ghost of Tsushima - you get separate armor sets for different activities, which is not too bad, except one of the sets is for exploration. So every time you switch between combat and riding your horse, if you don’t switch your armor sets, then it feels that the game is punishing you.
I love both of those games, but really really hate that mechanic.
If you hate menu diving then Tears of the Kingdom will actually make you go insane. I’m constantly swapping armor and scrolling up and down to find specific items.
For a game that has borderline genius baked into almost every system it presents, the UX of the menus is bafflingly shite.
That’s funny, I actually think TotK is great in this regard.
The DPad Up quick inventory menu is awesome and the sorting options are exactly what I’d want (most used, attack power, type, and zonai).
Having quick swappable equipment sets would be nice but so many games lack that feature that I don’t even think about it. In TotK it also seems unnecessary unless you’re into min-max. Like, I just need one piece of fire immune clothing to go into Death Mountain, I don’t need to wear an entire set and if I was really lazy I could pop an elixir from the quick select menu instead.
Cooking is annoying though. It’s such a fun animation and satisfying outcome but the laborious hold and drop mechanics get tedious when you’re cooking in bulk.
Oh my god yes, couldn’t someone have come up with a better way to do this over the 6 years of development time? I keep itching for full text search at the very least.
Gear breaking is the worst mechanic of them all. At least if it is every 5 hits.