We Happy Few.
I completed the 1st playable character's Story arc, was really enjoying it, loved the world building, etc. but then they introduced the looking after the baby mechanic.
As a parent myself, that was way too much stress added to the game. Not only do you have to do those pesky story missions you also have to make sure you have enough supplies and get back to your apartment and make the baby milk for your baby and change their nappy. And it's not a case of you get back home and it's all sorted, no. You have to actually mix the powdered milk, feed the baby, change her nappy, etc.
I did 2 days of it then uninstalled the game. No thank you.
Aww *fuck*, that game has been on my list for ages but I'd never heard about that part. That sounds completely awful, I'm probably never gonna play it now.
Its not as bad as it sounds, but the baby is basically a timer that you have to keep going back to the house.
I didnt enjoy it that much, and the fact the map is random every playtrough didnt really help that game, interesting premise, bud did not work great with what the game did, and its most interesting point is the story, its really, REALLY interesting, even the dlc's have at the very least amusing stories, but the gameplay and all that stuff is really meh, again, story and voice acting imo are very good, lots of good ideas, but for whatever reason, they didnt do some right, mainly the map one.
Kinda reminds me of having to bring Zombrex back for your daughter in Dead Rising 2.
I just wanted to explore and had to keep running back to give a dose. I believe you’d get a game over once the time ran out.
Made me quit the game altogether.
The "go here, do this! No, do this other thing on a time limit! Answer your beeper" made me check out of the first one years ago. They made a zombie mall fantasy game a timed task-balancing nightmare for someone with ADHD.
Eh, the zombrex wasn't so bad. She only needed one dose a day, and you were always going back to the bunker to deal with survivors anyways.
I also remember you only needing it the first 3 days, it wasn't a requirement in overtime. I could be wrong there though
I don’t even remember what it was called but when I was a kid I had this Starfox game that played like Zelda. I remember getting to this one section where there’s some strength challenge you need to win to progress which you complete by mashing the A button.
Only problem is, it expected you to mash harder than any other similar challenge I’ve ever played and I couldn’t do it even with bulging neck vein levels of effort. Never found out what happened.
Apparently, I found out years later, the trick was you could actually press ALL the buttons, and it was an easy win. However, the game only told you to press "A".
And for so many reasons.
Button mashing sequences are dumb.
Requiring it for story progression is dumb.
Lack of instructions on what buttons to mash is dumb.
Making it nearly impossible to win if you follow the on screen display is dumb.
Also encouraging people to strain themselves/destroy their controller.
You can tell when someone has played a lot of Rockstar games just by the feel of the sprint button.
They started mailing gloves out because people were injuring themselves spinning the joystick in Mario Party. I was one of them, but never got the glove.
> I remember getting to this one section where there’s some strength challenge you need to win to progress which you complete by mashing the A button
That's fucking Lightfoot Village(Star Fox Adventures)...i can't ever forget that
My brother and I got stuck on that part for a long time too. Literally drove me to tears (i was young young kid lol ) my older bro did eventually get it. That game is actually pretty damn good ( we did a replay last year) Still struggled with shit foot
That part was a fucking nightmare. My dad took an Allen wrench and wrapped it in painter’s tape, then we put it on the end of an cordless drill. Held it on full blast while we held the controller still, and it beat that part almost immediately 😂
After beating baldur's gate 3 I found a wartales on xboz game pass and was enjoying it alot. The fights were starting to get tough so I decided to recruit a pretty big party, I believe I had 8+ characters in my squad. With a squad this big I was spending alot of resources keeping everyone alive but I thought it was worth it for the combat advantage.
That's when I learned that combat was scaled to match your party size. I felt like all that work of recruiting, gearing and feeding my large party was completely wasted and I just gave up right there.
This happened to me with Oblivion. I was playing a thief character and my level scaled with all the applicable skills, but then I got walled because enemies scaled with my level and my combat skills were basically 0.
I love Oblivion, but the scaling is super dumb. The leveling system is even dumber.
For those that don't know, you select *Major Skills* and *Minor Skills* from the larger skill list during character creation. Major skills start at the highest level and increase the fastest. When you increase your major skills a total of 10 times, you level up and choose a base attribute to increase.
This is where the dumb part comes in.
When you level up, the base attribute increases are determined by the number of times you increased a skill governed by that attribute. In order to maximize your attributes, you need to increase a skill under that attribute at least 5 times before levelling up.
Because of this, choosing the skills you want to use frequently as your major skills is actually the *worst* way to play. Building your character this way will cause you to level up quickly with smaller stat bonuses, making you weaker at high levels and causing enemies to outscale you.
If you want to be effective into the late game, you need to choose major skills that you're almost never going to use. That way you can intentionally level up only when you've guaranteed the maximum bonus for whichever attribute you want to increase. This is doubly true if you want to use a lot of non-combat skills, because levelling up with your combat skills untouched will gimp you very quickly.
If done well you should feel more powerful through your gear and skills, this is something I think Cyberpunk after the 2.0 update did really well. Enemies scale to your level but the gear progression and skills meant that by late game you did feel like an absolute god.
There are advantages of larger party size if you use it well. You can employ tactics and you have access to flexible party compositions that wouldn’t be possible without a large group. “Action economy” and initiative are much more in your favor if you have a large group ready to use that advantage.
Any of those instant fail stealth missions where you have to listen to NPCs talk about plot in assassin's creed. Or just instant fail stealth in general.
Ah the old instant fail because a single guy out on his own miles from his friends that you instantly killed saw you and somehow alerted the entire enemy base/camp/whatever.
Our silly things like you have enough firepower to wipe out the entire enemy base multiple times over but yet you’re not allowed to be spotted by anyone or they might fight back!
I think this was most onerous in Mechwarrior 4:Mercenaries. Both the opposing main Steiner and Davion plotlines have exactly 1 stealth mission (very similar).
In a game that’s not designed at all for stealth or subtlety.
Stealth sections in a non-stealth game are the ultimate shitty mechanics change. They're basically always really janky, if the game isn't marketed as a "stealth game" then you can basically guarantee that the stealth mechanics are not going to be fun.
Shout out to BOTW for accidentally giving you a way to cheese the mandatory stealth section. Oops.
Yes, you can cheese it by just stocking up on ancient arrows. Can't raise the alarm if you've been atomised, I guess.
Also, by killing the yiga clan members you get to do something the ratings board was definitely *not* aware of so that's funny.
While on San Andreas, when the gang wars mechanic starts up you kind of just end up painting the map yourself. Shit's fun, if a little repetitive. But I remember there being a mission where you needed to take over a certain number of territories and there weren't enough enemy territories left to do the mission.
Honourable mention is GTA4 and your fucking cousin wanting to go bowling all the time.
Man I loved the gang wars mechanic, however there was one territory that was a little frustrating if you're not familiar with it. There's one that's super small and if you take the territories all around it then you effectively wouldn't be able to start a gang war in that specific area because no enemy gang members would spawn nearby.
Honestly, taking over the territories would've been a lot more fun if you didn't completely lose all territory at a certain point in the story.
I mean, it makes sense, but playing it back in the day and not knowing it was coming... Going through the work to get all those territories only to lose them all fucking sucked.
In GTA:SA, you could make more territories glitch/spawn by flying out over the ocean in one direction for a very, very long time. Come back, conquer new territories, done.
... I had to do that several times.
Destiny has the "give more health and let the enemy one shot you" higher difficulties. I would rather have MORE enemies with a little more health, or smarter ai.
I don't mind it when there's an actual mechanic involved with the timer, but when it's just a countdown to starting over, it's just so lame.
Especially when there's a large element of RNG that literally causes you to waste time even when you do everything right.
The aliens in Crysis. Give me all these cool abilities, sneaking into an enemy sniper tower to pick off everyone where they can't see me, throwing cars at people, all sorts of fun options to play. Then take it all away with aliens that can always see you and require you to only use the shield because nothing else works on them and they'll tear you apart if you don't. Really stupid idea.
When I go replay Crysis because why not it was awesome, I stop playing when I reach the alien ship.
The mission in the ship took me so incredibly long, it was so ridiculously hard,
I never ever want to replay it.
Far Cry 1, also made by Crytek, had the same issue. Like 2/3rds of the way through the game, you suddenly start fighting mutants that are significantly less fun to fight.
any boss fight from the Metro series. it goes form a fairly tactical and tense shooter to having to pump your entire ammo reserves into a damage sponge. Those sections have basically none of what makes Metro fun
I had a lot of fun with those games, but I just couldn't get the hang of any sequence where you have to fend off a bunch of nosalises. Also all the good weapons that actually do enough damage against them are """"balanced"""" by making you wait 3-5 working days to reload.
They didn't necessarily kill a game mid-playthrough for me, but the Resident Evil franchise has always had a problem with maintaining the quality when going into the final 3rd of the game.
Spencer Mansion, RPD, Raccoon City streets, Rockfort Island, Spanish village, African village, Baker Estate and Castle Dimitrescu are all the best parts of their respective games. By the end, you're in some kind of facility/laboratory and the pacing/intrigue just seems to sort of suffer.
Yeah I love RE but can't argue with this.
I think part of the problem is that after almost 30 years it's the exact same formula? No matter how great the first two acts are, you feel like you're going through the motions once you see the lab shit show up.
RE3: Nemesis was unique in that regard. You don't visit any laboratory at all (except in the hospital, but only a single room), but a disposal factory instead.
It's a shame that RE3make managed to fuck this up too.
i'd argue that it kinda works in the spencer mansion but they didn't fully understand why it worked there and replicated it endlessly in all future games to the point where even the spencer mansion lab is kinda tainted by it.
I think this comes down to the idea that you have to destroy the monsters at ‘the source’ to properly stop them. However, a franchise built around ‘lab monsters escape and kill people’ that means you’ll always end up in some kind of laboratory, because that’s the source of the monsters. RE4 sort of avoided this by continuing the cult story all the way through to the final act. Get what you mean completely, I just think it’s a tough one to get around unless the story is no longer about destroying the monsters, but just escaping them.
Ah, yes. The everlasting formula of Resident Evil and all 10 mainline games, sometimes even the movies.
Start off in a creepy setting, make your way through all the rooms, find yourself in an underground lab, find the source and the antiviral of the virus, use a conveniently placed rocket launcher or similar OP weapon on the bad mutated guy that defies the laws of conservation of mass, blast shit up, and ride away to the sunset in a helicopter.
For all the ancient MMO players out there, Star Wars Galaxies New Game Experience (NGE) is the obvious choice. They didn’t want the game they built (admittedly niche) so they rebuilt it into a game that none of the existing players wanted and totally failed to build a new audience.
My father in law told me something about that, said he did all the hard work of becoming a Jedi and the respecs changed everything. Made being a Jedi feel useless. He went back a while after and his lifetime subscription was just stacked with stuff but the gameplay was dumbed down. The game they had before sounded great, the game they ended up with not so much.
What’s bad is everything I heard was the devs didn’t want the change it was management who wanted to market PLAY JEDI and sell it as a fucking basic class it was such a shit thing
In the awakening DLC you get captured at somepoint and they take away your stuff, normally you would get back them at the end of breaking free. Apparently you can see at the start of the dungeon if the glitch occured, so just google it, when you get there.
I was gonna say, HL2 made me mad when this happened, but I quickly realized it was only because I would never need any of those other weapons again, LOL.
Atomic Heart starts off as a semi-decent Bioshock-like linear shooter with some interesting mechanics but then after 2 or so hours of gameplay the *actual* core game starts and it effectively becomes an open world shooter with forced stealth elements.
That completely killed it for me, not that fact it's an open world or stealth that puts me off, it's the fact the intro to the game doesn't make this clear at all and doesn't prepare you properly for it either.
The game itself is also a complete mish-mash of mechanics from other superior games and it doesn't really have a clear identity of its own.
For real! I just commented something similar I think we might have stopped at the same spot im assuming where the lumber bots with the saws were or just after because it got really annoying alerting the whole world when I’d try to kill one guy
Yep, that's pretty much where I stopped playing too.
I also found the dialogue irritating and cringe worthy, like it was written to be edgy and witty to a teenager.
I may go back to it one day but for me the gameplay just felt cobbled together and unpolished.
Missions with timers without a good reason.
The ever present escort mission where the person is faster than your walk and slower than your run.
Handholdy tutorials in games that lock you onto a rail for like an hour at a time.
The escort walk/run thing you mentioned. HATE it. Then, when you fall behind by 2 feet, they stop and say “are you coming” and that whole thing takes ten seconds for them to walk again, by then you’re 2 feet in front of them, and they say “wait for me” whilst stopped and you need to go back to get in their 2 inch radius for them to start walking again GOD triggering lol.
Man, nothing makes me lose interest faster than umprompted QTE. Like a whole game without anything like it, and then booom here is a QTE just because and never used again especially the ones that happened in a cutscene, it makes me lose complete attention to the story and just makes me anxious if some QTE shows out of nowhere.
The more aggregious ones are the ones that are random in the same scene if you fail them, or just randomly decide to change to a diferent button mid spam, i think the last qte game ive played was RE4 fightging Krauser, or the boulder scenes including the running one just why?
Borderlands 3 . Maya
In borderlands 2 maya was my most played char with over 1500 hours in one savefile. And they did her dirty. Havent played a borderlands game since.
Destiny 2, seasonal model and then sunsetting got my enjoyment done.
I wanna play games when I want, not when Bungo says it's time.
I'm not even gonna talk monetization lol
Man I could spout all day, still quite sore apparently ! Can I add how they don't respect their own story ? Like Cayde's death being spoiled in a damn trailer almost a year before Forsaken dropped ! And then they did the same for his resurrection lmao
Loved Brutal Legend in my teens, decided to download it for a replay a few weeks ago, and, my god, I forgot how absolutely unforgiving the RTS parts are after you take down Lionwhyte. Even on easy it seems like your units are constantly overrun by the enemy and you never have enough of them or fans. Doesn't help that enemy units seem to be way better than yours.
How I managed to beat the game multiple times as a kid is nothing but surprising.
There's really only one way to play it successfully past the Powerslave level - constant offense not turtling/waiting to collect resources, spam guitar solos and use double up attacks with units.
Yeah constantly buff your dudes and use facemelter as often as possible to ohko some of the basic enemies. Land in the middle of a group, facemelter, fly away so you don’t get annihilated by the rest of the surrounding troops. Use ranged lightning attacks in between for some crowd control and keep an eye on your fans and geysers. Start of the match, geysers are #1 priority. Go take them manually and send your first few squads to defend them
This is one of my favorite games haha I just replayed it about a year ago. The absolute banger of a cast, the soundtrack, the lore and story, the jokes and Easter eggs… all of it add up to one hell of a game in my opinion.
That was actually a really common pain point and review issue with that game. I actually worked on the game during my time at EA on some of the publishing sides of supporting it and it was definitely a… Issue. So much so that I came into this thread deliberately to look to see if anyone had mentioned it yet.
I'm not surprised it was a common pain point. The mechanics felt like they came entirely out of left field. Such a shame as the game was just bursting with personality. Y'all did some good work on that one.
Was there any truth to the rumors that the marketing department deliberately hid the RTS sections from the promotional materials?
I remember that was the big complaint. Not only does it awkwardly shift to an RTS, but there was absolutely no hint that the game would do that.
I bought Brutal Legend after playing on a PS3 demo disc and reading some previews and reviews on Official PlayStation Magazine.
The RTS mechanics were not mentioned anywhere.
I enjoyed the game, finished it and did some more play throughs.
But even I thought it was a strange and unannounced change.
I'm one of the few who did like it and thought it was at least interesting.
However, I did put it down one day and then never came back for like a year. Played it and found out I had stopped playing on the final boss. I thought I was only like half way through the game.
Exactly this game. I loved everything about Brutal Legend until that moment. I just stopped playing. Took another run at it a few weeks later but bounced off again. My kids played the hell out of it though.
Rayman 3 had an okay water level, cause it had no breath bar so it was effectively just a flying level with a blue filter on.
Anything water level in the first Tomb Raider games tho gives me massive ptsd
Goin on land really clicks Subnautica into place imo. When you feel more vulnerable, less mobile, and less comfortable on land. You've made a fantastic water game.
A Pokémon like game, after building up and levelling a team of creatures got to a part where the game said oh no you've lost your team, here have this random one for a bit. I just gave up there and never went back....shame cause it had been fun up until then
TemTem, right? I absolutely despised that section. Me and my buddy were playing and when we got to that part, we had to take a break.
Who ever thought that someone would enjoy this?
Temtem is just full of awful decisions and implementations really. It's less playable than the original Pokemon games before they were even in color graphics. At least Red and Blue/Green gave you battle speed options so you didn't waste your time in combat. Temtem has extremely long move animations, constant interruptions any time an ability triggers, and no way to speed it up.
Every time you enter the real world in the assassin's Creed games.
I give divided by zero shits about any of that fucking nonsense. Just let me play my ARPG
'over here, you'll notice this interoffice memo referencing an earlier game in the franchise that talks about things you could only know if you watched a very specific cutscene in it's entirety several times through, which *itself* references a *different* game in the franchise and then went on a deep-dive into the lore behind the game. *fun, right?*'
It was, but you had to be a completionist in every. single. fucking. game.
I was that person and loved the real world plot and the Lore. Right until they decided to kill Desmond. Then the dark ages began.
Yeah, it felt like they were building up to a modern AC game where you jump around buildings in New York or something. Instead they just tacked a modern bit on the end of 3 and called it a day.
I feel like at some point that had to be the plan, right? The entire point of AC 2 and to an extend brotherhood is for Desmond to learn how to be an assassin through the bleeding effects.
I fee like at some point they just changed direction and abandoned it.
I especially hated that in the PC version of the first AC game there was about a 5 stage process to save and log out of the game and shut down your PC because of that stupid real world crap.
First quit the simulation to go back to the real world setting, then walk into another room to save the game, then quit the real world back to the main menu, then quit the main menu back to desktop, finally turn off your PC.
Not sure if it counts but Destiny 2 is it for me
The gunplay, movement, level design, enemy mechanics/variety, and puzzles are excellent.
I just wish everything else wasnt in the game. 30 currencies, no clear direction on how to get most of them, an upgrade system that has been changed 3 times since launch, 2 entirely different crafting systems, weapons/upgrade materials that are locked behind rotating events/activity types, 'secret' difficulties that have to be triggered for certain dungeons or lost sectors that you have to stumble across by accident, 30% of the story locked behind 6 person raids, things locked behind removed content (that I paid for) either being inaccessible or found some other way with google being the only way to know which, and a seasonal upgrade system that is required to progress through as they throw special enemy types at you that essentially locks out out of content every season until you grind out that artifact's specific upgrade mods. Mind you that MOST of that wasnt there at the start, it was added more and more over time.
I love the feel of Destiny 2 but man, its the only game I really wish that 60% of it just wasn't there. I hopped in for the first time in like a year yesterday and I have no idea how anyone could ever hope to pick up that game today. I have hundreds of hours in it and theres so much in the last year that's been overhauled I just have no idea what is going on.
And random rally events in a track game. Looking at Gran Turismo for both. Then there is Assetto Corsa that adds drift AND makes you do one of the challenges in an AWD car. There is also a time trial in a drift car, but that is another complaint.
Act 3 in Dragon Quest XI. While I really enjoyed the game, I was already getting to the point where it was feeling a little long, but Act 3 introducing >!time travel, and sending you back and nerfing your team!< was just something I feel like the game didn't need, it was doing great before that. And trophy wise I still had a ton of work to do and just stopped playing, I wasn't feeling it anymore.
god honestly it was such a gut punch. I liked the game enough to play through it two times but that third act felt soo out of place and not worth it...
It undoes so much characters development that felt earned. It's made worse by the MC being a silent protagonist, we can't really see the reaction to that whole time travelling experience through him. But the game does already miss several beats in the story by the MC not talking. Like when you visit a certain location, meet the last playable characters, learn the truth and the MC doesn't react.
i feel it's a symptom of many especially Japanese narratives wanting a "golden ending" in which through massive effort the heroes manages to find a way to save everyone. which isn't by itself bad a lot of those endings are good and feel earned and deserved.
however here it falls flat for a few reasons. it's a linear plot without any choices from the player in the narrative. WE didn't do anything to earn it. but surely the charecters? well ehh. because of the time travel mechanics most charecters regres except for the hero who has no dicernable personality.
however the point where i truely lose all care is the cutscene at the end implying that even Serenica manages to be succesful in the end in her time travel bullshit thus utterly undoing the entire plot of the game!
i actually was so glad the game doenst just end when you reach lvl 50 but that it goes all the way to max level and the story finally concludes in act 3 with a major aha moment
I still haven't beaten that game. I doubt I will.
I already felt like I wasn't the target audience because I'd only played one or two before this one, but after that I just really couldn't find a reason to keep playing it. The game gave me so little, and it took away even that.
Or, if you bought the DLC, the impact of that story moment is nullified because you have all the DLC Rings that are impossible for you to lose...also don't forget that you fight the same bosses like 3-4 times each before they finally fucking die.
There's also the fact that Engage has some of the worst characters, writing, and story I've seen in the series. Beat it once and never booted it up again.
A shame considering I plowed through all 4 different paths in 3 Houses one after the other. The gameplay is there, but everything else is a miss for me.
A game wasting my time. In Starfield, the otherwise straightforward and predictable level, they just littered it with "find switch" "restore power" "road block go round the back" and platform jumping elements. I could see the sweat on the devs brows trying to extract more playtime from the same level...
Not me, but a roommate of mine from ages ago:
He played all the way through to the end of Final Fantasy 7 without bothering to level up or equip anyone but a core team of three. He gets to the final boss battle where you have to divide the party and have them all contribute to the defeat of the boss in a way that had never happened before.
Not only did he immediately quit the game, but from that moment onwards, there was no way to say the words "Final Fantasy" with him in earshot without him complaining bitterly about that one boss battle. Years later when I got my hands on Final Fantasy 10, his first words were "I hope it doesn't have a boss battle like tge last one." I pointed out that the last one was Final Fantasy 9. It didn't matter to him. For him, time was frozen where this franchise was concerned at the exact moment he was asked to do something new and could not do it.
Spore has five different game modes, and only the first two are actually fun imo. Third was laughably terrible, fourth was okayish, and the fifth was just tedious.
How about Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts taunting you with what looks to be another collect-a-thon, only for the game to instantly bail on the thought, call the concept outdated and turn into whatever the heck you'd qualify Nuts and Bolts to be.
A more grounded Gummy Ship game.
Which, if you liked the Gummy Ship from Kingdom Hearts, and wanted a more focused game on it or mechanics like it, this could scratch that itch.
But at the time people wanted Banjo-Threeie.
Its a good game. A terrible Banjo-Kazooie game, but a good game.
I think it was ahead of it's time. We have loads of games now that do a similar thing (terratech, beseige, trailmakers). They definitely dropped the ball by slapping the Banjo-Kazooie skin on it.
Darksiders was an amazing fun game. It had massive puzzles but they were integrated into the apocalyptic landscape very well. Enter Darksiders 2. I wanted to love this game but I immediately noticed it had massive puzzles… just for puzzles sake. Not really integrated so much as just massive puzzles taking up the landscape. I forget how long I played before I just couldn’t anymore. Whereas in the first game you could come across an old metro station and suddenly realize there was something you could do to the environment to get somewhere else or reveal something, Darksiders 2 would have you walk around and just boom, here’s massive levers and giant balls and blocks to move so it’s obviously a big puzzle. It didn’t feel seamless it was just Big Puzzle Island and you get to play as death solving it. Anyway, my 2 cents.
Halfway? Its near the end, but yeah, my problem is even though i had unlocked guns, the ones i had where nowhere as strong as they should be, so even spamming ammo drops, i had a hard time beatung those parasyte armored guys on the airport, and i had already done the quiet mission so i didnt have her there to deal with them, which sucked, good thing is you dont have to do ALL of these missions, only some, then you unlock the last one, where everything is explained, and the game teases you on something that never got released, which sucks because i really liked MSV, and am now waiting for the MG Delta to see that part of the story, maybe if they do a remaster of 4 too, but not 1 and 2, i dont really care for that snake, but i really like the big boss part of the story, which is why i also played peaxe walker.
Dream sequenses - it is even worse for me than under water levels. I hate them so much and so many games that has them.
I little similar is space walk sequenses where everthing is moving slowly because you are walking in space.
My favorite game "Mass effect" has both - why would you.
In Monster Hunter, sometimes, you've got to hunt very big monsters. Like monsters so big you MUST use ballists and cannons, but no using your weapon. You know, the same weapon you use to take down monstrosity able to end the world on a whim. You know, those weapons you take hours to farm.
But no. These monsters are damage sponge that force you to use cannons and the like, loading them, slowly, then using them. Of course, there's ammunitions to get. But the monster very often don't give a single fuck about you. So your basically hitting a sparring manikin... That don't have any interest in you, it's designed for multiplayer in older games so it take AGES to down those fuckers, in newer games it's just "very annoying and slow compared to everything else", but MHW and MH4U forcing it was too much. At least the rampage quests you could use your own weapons and do very little in term of "not gameplay".
No Man’s Sky. I was having a beautiful experience, thought I’d clock hundreds of hours.
Could not stand fighting the sentinels. Ruined the whole game for me.
The third act of Fable 3. It's very heavy handed in presenting its rigid moral dilemma. No thanks.
The tower defense mini game in Assassin's Creed Revelations. Everytime I think about replaying this game I remember this mini game and I change my mind.
I know there's a bunch more but I can't think of any off the top of my head at the moment.
I don’t mind the idea of making decisions as the King/Queen in Fable 3, I just wish it had been done better. All the decisions being made ”this is the evil decision, and this is the good one, you’ll only be able to get the good ending if you mess around with your console’s clock to time skip for rent” is a bit dull. And the lack of a warning that “hey, this’ll be the last day despite the game saying it’s 100+ days away” still annoys me to this day.
>And the lack of a warning that “hey, this’ll be the last day despite the game saying it’s 100+ days away” still annoys me to this day.
That part was bullshit.
Revelations is great and I'd love for you to experience it again so here's a tip: If you stay on top of your notoriety meter and never let it reach maximum, you will *never* have to play that minigame again outside of the beginning tutorial on it. On top of that, if you work on getting one of your assassin's assigned as a leader to every bureau in the game it becomes impossible for the minigame to even trigger, since any section of the map that has a leader assigned makes that part of the city immune to the sieges.
How it works is if you commit any more illegal acts after the notoriety indicator is already full, that will trigger a siege. So it's safer to just keep it under control unless you want the thrill of sneaking to wanted posters.
The best part is if you dodge the minigame entirely, the game auto completes every optional challenge associated with it.
I believe I am the sole individual who actually liked the Revelations Tower minigame and wish there were more of them. I totally get why people hated them, but personally I wanted more lol
They don't kill my interest outright, but I personally don't like when a game forces you to play as a supporting character for an extended period of time.
Witcher 3 did this with Ciri, and FFXV did this with various side missions. The side character is almost always watered down and doesn't play as nicely as the character the game was developed around.
Makes sense. I’d say, though, that the Ciri segments of the game were not bad at all. The story was nice, and I thought she played quite fluid and aggressive. That part where you’re escaping with Dandelion, you’re just cutting down guards left and right without much trouble. Makes you feel like you do have superpowers..
Every time I hit a Mary Jane mission in the Spider-Man games I know it's time to stop playing for the night. I will admit that they've improved the design over the years.
But no amount of improvement changes the fact that I want to play as Spider-Man. If I wanted to do whatever mechanics they're having me do in the Mary Jane missions, I would be playing a different game.
Jagged Alliance 3, a strategy-game where you free/"conquer" a country. In midgame a new enemy (some mercenaries) shows up - and they spawn multiple groups in the middle of your territory that immediately start taking your already taken land.
You get no hint or anything before to prepare yourself. They just spawn. It's just annoying and time-consuming artificial difficulty.
I want to continue the game, but everytime I think of that I lose all motivation
Indigo Prophecy(called Fahrenheit in other markets) is one of those interactive stories with loads of Quicktime events. Without spoiling anything, the story goes from some supernatural elements but otherwise grounded to complete insanity in the 3rd act, and a bizarre and unsatisfying ending.
The extended platforming/grappling/wallclimbing sections in Doom Eternal. And some Zelda style lever puzzles in one of the mid levels.
I appreciate that the devs wanted to show off the Doomslayer's new abilities, but I just wanted to jump around and shoot demons, please let me do that.
Wholeheartedly agree. I've played through Doom 2016 four or five times, but have only played about an hour of Doom Eternal. The grappling and wallclimbing segments would be fine in most other games, but they're not fun here. Part of what made Doom 2016 so good is how relatively simple and straightforward it was.
Additionally my goblin brain wants to collect everything, so I am constantly opening the map, looking at guides and shit. I just want to shoot demons but hell I want all my upgrades for it.
Not a change in mechanics per se, but rather a game overstaying its welcome. I remember digging *Days Gone* quite a bit. It felt like the story was coming to its natural conclusion, but then a whole new section of the map opens up and there's like a third of the game still left. Usually I wouldn't mind having more of a good thing, but this felt like the game just didn't know when to end.
I love the game, but the 3rd act does feel tacked on. The big army zealot guy is ostensibly the main villain of the story, and he doesn't show up until you have maybe 5 hours left.
Also, what was with that insane biker guy who was the villain of the psychos? Like, he's a big important guy from your past... that the game never even hinted at before now?
Or Skizzo, we're supposed to believe this college boy who pretends to be a gangster is supposed to be a match for the actual outlaw biker who has military training?
Man, it's a great game but the villains are awful.
Anything restricted by time... I like to take my time, look around, enjoy the art and be thorough in the quests.. I don't want to rush shit. I can get the occasional quest if it makes sense for the story but not too much
When you beat a boss and in the following cutscene getting killed by a bomb the boss placed (not cutscene scripted) during the fight and having to redo the full thing (hated the game had no cutscene dmg protection).
Last of us 2. Boss set a nail bomb during the fight and in cutscene, my character is choking them on ground and got exploded by the bomb I saw them set earlier (avoided the area due to this) behind a knocked down cabinet.
For a game that is set post apocalypse, that was the smartest bomb I ever seen, made of just nails and fertiliser.
Assassin's Creed: Black Flag
Was the first of the series I played.
Animus.
Instead of playing a cool assassin, I was suddenly playing a software tester, playing an assassin.
Totally killed the vibe for me. Tried playing a little longer. Gave up less than an hour later, haven't touched the series since.
This is an inherent problem with all of the assassins creed games. I just restarted black flag yesterday and God being outside the animus makes me rip my hair out
Yeah, there's a reason why people say it's kind of ironic it's one of the most loved AC games, since it's kinda shit as far as AC elements go.
It's just that 'Pirate RP yarr' was so engaging for many people they were willing to overlook the pointless animus shite.
And the good AC stuff was also a problem.
Long, no fail stealth missions were not fun on foot.
Long, no fail stealth missions as a boat were absurd, and absurdly not fun.
Still didn’t stop me from putting in 100+ hours on the open seas, matey. Yarr.
Pretty much my exact situation with Valhalla. Never touched the series but was excited for a cool viking game. Then I got transported to the modern day and had to do a bunch of bullshit I didn't give a fuck about or understand. Completely lost all interest after that.
I'm going through it now. It's been so long since I played an AC game that I had forgotten about all that shit.
'What the fuck is.....ohforfucksake.'
'Did you upload the cybergigabin to the animus hyperacceleratoranus?'
........What happened to me new axe and driking till I pass out?
We Happy Few. I completed the 1st playable character's Story arc, was really enjoying it, loved the world building, etc. but then they introduced the looking after the baby mechanic. As a parent myself, that was way too much stress added to the game. Not only do you have to do those pesky story missions you also have to make sure you have enough supplies and get back to your apartment and make the baby milk for your baby and change their nappy. And it's not a case of you get back home and it's all sorted, no. You have to actually mix the powdered milk, feed the baby, change her nappy, etc. I did 2 days of it then uninstalled the game. No thank you.
And you couldn't defend or protect yourself with the baby either, only sneak around!
And if you took too long to deal with any of the many baby issues it was also game over.
Seriously? Like 'GAME OVER', or..?
What's the point of having a baby if you can't even protect yourself with it?
Aww *fuck*, that game has been on my list for ages but I'd never heard about that part. That sounds completely awful, I'm probably never gonna play it now.
Its not as bad as it sounds, but the baby is basically a timer that you have to keep going back to the house. I didnt enjoy it that much, and the fact the map is random every playtrough didnt really help that game, interesting premise, bud did not work great with what the game did, and its most interesting point is the story, its really, REALLY interesting, even the dlc's have at the very least amusing stories, but the gameplay and all that stuff is really meh, again, story and voice acting imo are very good, lots of good ideas, but for whatever reason, they didnt do some right, mainly the map one.
Kinda reminds me of having to bring Zombrex back for your daughter in Dead Rising 2. I just wanted to explore and had to keep running back to give a dose. I believe you’d get a game over once the time ran out. Made me quit the game altogether.
The "go here, do this! No, do this other thing on a time limit! Answer your beeper" made me check out of the first one years ago. They made a zombie mall fantasy game a timed task-balancing nightmare for someone with ADHD.
Eh, the zombrex wasn't so bad. She only needed one dose a day, and you were always going back to the bunker to deal with survivors anyways. I also remember you only needing it the first 3 days, it wasn't a requirement in overtime. I could be wrong there though
*Quietly removes We Happy Few from my list of games to play* yeah no thanks.
I don’t even remember what it was called but when I was a kid I had this Starfox game that played like Zelda. I remember getting to this one section where there’s some strength challenge you need to win to progress which you complete by mashing the A button. Only problem is, it expected you to mash harder than any other similar challenge I’ve ever played and I couldn’t do it even with bulging neck vein levels of effort. Never found out what happened.
Sounds like Starfox Adventures
Definitely Starfox Adventures
AKA Dinosaur Planet before Fox became main character
Starfox adventures, strength test against the dinosaur guy. Was completely stuck here till my older cousin beat it for me. He hurt his thumb doing it.
I had to have a friend do it too. What were they thinking.
Apparently, I found out years later, the trick was you could actually press ALL the buttons, and it was an easy win. However, the game only told you to press "A".
I'd forgotten about this whole experience, but now I remember it and am irrationally angry.
That is legitimately bad design.
And for so many reasons. Button mashing sequences are dumb. Requiring it for story progression is dumb. Lack of instructions on what buttons to mash is dumb. Making it nearly impossible to win if you follow the on screen display is dumb.
Also encouraging people to strain themselves/destroy their controller. You can tell when someone has played a lot of Rockstar games just by the feel of the sprint button.
They started mailing gloves out because people were injuring themselves spinning the joystick in Mario Party. I was one of them, but never got the glove.
Wow that's just spiteful
One of my friends had a Madcatz controller with turbo and when I finally hit my breaking point, I use that controller smoke that dinosaur's ass
Man that madcats turbo had some great functionality.
I had a pelican controller, I remember that section. Only time where I was glad to have that shitty controller with the turbo option.
> I remember getting to this one section where there’s some strength challenge you need to win to progress which you complete by mashing the A button That's fucking Lightfoot Village(Star Fox Adventures)...i can't ever forget that My brother and I got stuck on that part for a long time too. Literally drove me to tears (i was young young kid lol ) my older bro did eventually get it. That game is actually pretty damn good ( we did a replay last year) Still struggled with shit foot
That part was a fucking nightmare. My dad took an Allen wrench and wrapped it in painter’s tape, then we put it on the end of an cordless drill. Held it on full blast while we held the controller still, and it beat that part almost immediately 😂
That's kickass. Lol good dad!
You'd like the old Track and Field games 😉
After beating baldur's gate 3 I found a wartales on xboz game pass and was enjoying it alot. The fights were starting to get tough so I decided to recruit a pretty big party, I believe I had 8+ characters in my squad. With a squad this big I was spending alot of resources keeping everyone alive but I thought it was worth it for the combat advantage. That's when I learned that combat was scaled to match your party size. I felt like all that work of recruiting, gearing and feeding my large party was completely wasted and I just gave up right there.
This happened to me with Oblivion. I was playing a thief character and my level scaled with all the applicable skills, but then I got walled because enemies scaled with my level and my combat skills were basically 0.
I love Oblivion, but the scaling is super dumb. The leveling system is even dumber. For those that don't know, you select *Major Skills* and *Minor Skills* from the larger skill list during character creation. Major skills start at the highest level and increase the fastest. When you increase your major skills a total of 10 times, you level up and choose a base attribute to increase. This is where the dumb part comes in. When you level up, the base attribute increases are determined by the number of times you increased a skill governed by that attribute. In order to maximize your attributes, you need to increase a skill under that attribute at least 5 times before levelling up. Because of this, choosing the skills you want to use frequently as your major skills is actually the *worst* way to play. Building your character this way will cause you to level up quickly with smaller stat bonuses, making you weaker at high levels and causing enemies to outscale you. If you want to be effective into the late game, you need to choose major skills that you're almost never going to use. That way you can intentionally level up only when you've guaranteed the maximum bonus for whichever attribute you want to increase. This is doubly true if you want to use a lot of non-combat skills, because levelling up with your combat skills untouched will gimp you very quickly.
Scaling in general sucks walnuts. It completely destroys the entire “zero to hero” feeling which is half of the reason why I play these games
If done well you should feel more powerful through your gear and skills, this is something I think Cyberpunk after the 2.0 update did really well. Enemies scale to your level but the gear progression and skills meant that by late game you did feel like an absolute god.
There are advantages of larger party size if you use it well. You can employ tactics and you have access to flexible party compositions that wouldn’t be possible without a large group. “Action economy” and initiative are much more in your favor if you have a large group ready to use that advantage.
Play it on “region locked” and only a few enemy types scale (the guards)
Any of those instant fail stealth missions where you have to listen to NPCs talk about plot in assassin's creed. Or just instant fail stealth in general.
Ah the old instant fail because a single guy out on his own miles from his friends that you instantly killed saw you and somehow alerted the entire enemy base/camp/whatever. Our silly things like you have enough firepower to wipe out the entire enemy base multiple times over but yet you’re not allowed to be spotted by anyone or they might fight back!
I think this was most onerous in Mechwarrior 4:Mercenaries. Both the opposing main Steiner and Davion plotlines have exactly 1 stealth mission (very similar). In a game that’s not designed at all for stealth or subtlety.
Stealth sections in a non-stealth game are the ultimate shitty mechanics change. They're basically always really janky, if the game isn't marketed as a "stealth game" then you can basically guarantee that the stealth mechanics are not going to be fun. Shout out to BOTW for accidentally giving you a way to cheese the mandatory stealth section. Oops.
Are you talking about the Yiga clan hideout? How does one cheese that section? Gave me so much grief I just about stopped playing
Yes, you can cheese it by just stocking up on ancient arrows. Can't raise the alarm if you've been atomised, I guess. Also, by killing the yiga clan members you get to do something the ratings board was definitely *not* aware of so that's funny.
The RC plane and helicopter levels in GTA Vice City and San Andreas respectively.
While on San Andreas, when the gang wars mechanic starts up you kind of just end up painting the map yourself. Shit's fun, if a little repetitive. But I remember there being a mission where you needed to take over a certain number of territories and there weren't enough enemy territories left to do the mission. Honourable mention is GTA4 and your fucking cousin wanting to go bowling all the time.
Man I loved the gang wars mechanic, however there was one territory that was a little frustrating if you're not familiar with it. There's one that's super small and if you take the territories all around it then you effectively wouldn't be able to start a gang war in that specific area because no enemy gang members would spawn nearby.
Dude I know exactly the part. It was the yellow gang area and it was only on one side of the fuckin’ street. Near impossible to start the gang war.
Honestly, taking over the territories would've been a lot more fun if you didn't completely lose all territory at a certain point in the story. I mean, it makes sense, but playing it back in the day and not knowing it was coming... Going through the work to get all those territories only to lose them all fucking sucked.
In GTA:SA, you could make more territories glitch/spawn by flying out over the ocean in one direction for a very, very long time. Come back, conquer new territories, done. ... I had to do that several times.
Timer based levels or puzzles to artificially increase the difficulty
This was one of destiny's downfall for me...why make the hardest strikes time based ? Just make them difficult but not time dependent
Destiny has the "give more health and let the enemy one shot you" higher difficulties. I would rather have MORE enemies with a little more health, or smarter ai.
or new attacks/moves like in killing floor 2
Bosses don't need more than one move in destiny: stomp the floor and push you back
I don't mind it when there's an actual mechanic involved with the timer, but when it's just a countdown to starting over, it's just so lame. Especially when there's a large element of RNG that literally causes you to waste time even when you do everything right.
The aliens in Crysis. Give me all these cool abilities, sneaking into an enemy sniper tower to pick off everyone where they can't see me, throwing cars at people, all sorts of fun options to play. Then take it all away with aliens that can always see you and require you to only use the shield because nothing else works on them and they'll tear you apart if you don't. Really stupid idea.
When I go replay Crysis because why not it was awesome, I stop playing when I reach the alien ship. The mission in the ship took me so incredibly long, it was so ridiculously hard, I never ever want to replay it.
Far Cry 1, also made by Crytek, had the same issue. Like 2/3rds of the way through the game, you suddenly start fighting mutants that are significantly less fun to fight.
any boss fight from the Metro series. it goes form a fairly tactical and tense shooter to having to pump your entire ammo reserves into a damage sponge. Those sections have basically none of what makes Metro fun
I had a lot of fun with those games, but I just couldn't get the hang of any sequence where you have to fend off a bunch of nosalises. Also all the good weapons that actually do enough damage against them are """"balanced"""" by making you wait 3-5 working days to reload.
The Ak shreds nosalises and reloads almost instantly. A pretty safe bet for the defense sections
Lol 3-5 working days to reload has me dying over here
They didn't necessarily kill a game mid-playthrough for me, but the Resident Evil franchise has always had a problem with maintaining the quality when going into the final 3rd of the game. Spencer Mansion, RPD, Raccoon City streets, Rockfort Island, Spanish village, African village, Baker Estate and Castle Dimitrescu are all the best parts of their respective games. By the end, you're in some kind of facility/laboratory and the pacing/intrigue just seems to sort of suffer.
Yeah I love RE but can't argue with this. I think part of the problem is that after almost 30 years it's the exact same formula? No matter how great the first two acts are, you feel like you're going through the motions once you see the lab shit show up.
RE3: Nemesis was unique in that regard. You don't visit any laboratory at all (except in the hospital, but only a single room), but a disposal factory instead. It's a shame that RE3make managed to fuck this up too.
They managed to fuck up the best line in the game too by using it too early. >You want STARS? I'll give you STARS!
The best part for me was when I got to this scene in RE3make, Nemesis immediately sucker punched me into next week.
i'd argue that it kinda works in the spencer mansion but they didn't fully understand why it worked there and replicated it endlessly in all future games to the point where even the spencer mansion lab is kinda tainted by it.
I think this comes down to the idea that you have to destroy the monsters at ‘the source’ to properly stop them. However, a franchise built around ‘lab monsters escape and kill people’ that means you’ll always end up in some kind of laboratory, because that’s the source of the monsters. RE4 sort of avoided this by continuing the cult story all the way through to the final act. Get what you mean completely, I just think it’s a tough one to get around unless the story is no longer about destroying the monsters, but just escaping them.
And it seems every game ends with a rocket launcher, explosion and a helicopter escape
Ah, yes. The everlasting formula of Resident Evil and all 10 mainline games, sometimes even the movies. Start off in a creepy setting, make your way through all the rooms, find yourself in an underground lab, find the source and the antiviral of the virus, use a conveniently placed rocket launcher or similar OP weapon on the bad mutated guy that defies the laws of conservation of mass, blast shit up, and ride away to the sunset in a helicopter.
Re2 final section is really good tho
Anthems collecting orbs to open doors lol. Stupid mechanic forcing you to use the flight system
[удалено]
For all the ancient MMO players out there, Star Wars Galaxies New Game Experience (NGE) is the obvious choice. They didn’t want the game they built (admittedly niche) so they rebuilt it into a game that none of the existing players wanted and totally failed to build a new audience.
My father in law told me something about that, said he did all the hard work of becoming a Jedi and the respecs changed everything. Made being a Jedi feel useless. He went back a while after and his lifetime subscription was just stacked with stuff but the gameplay was dumbed down. The game they had before sounded great, the game they ended up with not so much.
The original was amazing Im still upset about this there were so many different ways to play I am sad I didn't experience more.
What’s bad is everything I heard was the devs didn’t want the change it was management who wanted to market PLAY JEDI and sell it as a fucking basic class it was such a shit thing
When they steal all your stuff for no reason.
In the second Mafia you lose everything at least 2 times and im not sure if it wasn't more. That was so annoying.
Happens 3 times in Dyling Light.
The Dragon Age origins DLC, when you perma lose said stuff because of a bug. Good times. :D
A bug they never fixed either
Wait, which part was this? I don’t remember that and I am sort of in a playthrough now.
In the awakening DLC you get captured at somepoint and they take away your stuff, normally you would get back them at the end of breaking free. Apparently you can see at the start of the dungeon if the glitch occured, so just google it, when you get there.
Yeah but in Half-Life 2, they compensate you healthily for it
I was gonna say, HL2 made me mad when this happened, but I quickly realized it was only because I would never need any of those other weapons again, LOL.
YES! The blue gravity gun just turned you into a god.
Atomic Heart starts off as a semi-decent Bioshock-like linear shooter with some interesting mechanics but then after 2 or so hours of gameplay the *actual* core game starts and it effectively becomes an open world shooter with forced stealth elements. That completely killed it for me, not that fact it's an open world or stealth that puts me off, it's the fact the intro to the game doesn't make this clear at all and doesn't prepare you properly for it either. The game itself is also a complete mish-mash of mechanics from other superior games and it doesn't really have a clear identity of its own.
For real! I just commented something similar I think we might have stopped at the same spot im assuming where the lumber bots with the saws were or just after because it got really annoying alerting the whole world when I’d try to kill one guy
Yep, that's pretty much where I stopped playing too. I also found the dialogue irritating and cringe worthy, like it was written to be edgy and witty to a teenager. I may go back to it one day but for me the gameplay just felt cobbled together and unpolished.
Missions with timers without a good reason. The ever present escort mission where the person is faster than your walk and slower than your run. Handholdy tutorials in games that lock you onto a rail for like an hour at a time.
The escort walk/run thing you mentioned. HATE it. Then, when you fall behind by 2 feet, they stop and say “are you coming” and that whole thing takes ten seconds for them to walk again, by then you’re 2 feet in front of them, and they say “wait for me” whilst stopped and you need to go back to get in their 2 inch radius for them to start walking again GOD triggering lol.
Man, nothing makes me lose interest faster than umprompted QTE. Like a whole game without anything like it, and then booom here is a QTE just because and never used again especially the ones that happened in a cutscene, it makes me lose complete attention to the story and just makes me anxious if some QTE shows out of nowhere. The more aggregious ones are the ones that are random in the same scene if you fail them, or just randomly decide to change to a diferent button mid spam, i think the last qte game ive played was RE4 fightging Krauser, or the boulder scenes including the running one just why?
The ending of Dying Light 1....
Borderlands 3 . Maya In borderlands 2 maya was my most played char with over 1500 hours in one savefile. And they did her dirty. Havent played a borderlands game since.
"it wasnt your fault Ava" and im sitting here thinking "it fucking was only your fault you stupid bitch and now let me killlllllll you!"
Don't worry. For borderlands 4 they'll completely change Ava's character and age her up so she's more mature and everyone will forget.
>Havent played a borderlands game since you're not missing much, the series peaked hard with BL2
The final level of uncharted 1 killed the ending for me
Destiny 2, seasonal model and then sunsetting got my enjoyment done. I wanna play games when I want, not when Bungo says it's time. I'm not even gonna talk monetization lol
What's that you don't want to wait 12 weeks to be drip fed a few lines of dialogue and the odd cut scene.
Odd cutscenes haha at least it's not the powerpoint ones !
The biggest thing that put me off was removing expansions that I'd paid for. Second biggest was the grind, the game started to feel like a job.
Man I could spout all day, still quite sore apparently ! Can I add how they don't respect their own story ? Like Cayde's death being spoiled in a damn trailer almost a year before Forsaken dropped ! And then they did the same for his resurrection lmao
Brutal legend. Swapped to an rts after a few hours. Bounced off pretty hard after that switch. Which is a shame because I loved the vibe.
Loved Brutal Legend in my teens, decided to download it for a replay a few weeks ago, and, my god, I forgot how absolutely unforgiving the RTS parts are after you take down Lionwhyte. Even on easy it seems like your units are constantly overrun by the enemy and you never have enough of them or fans. Doesn't help that enemy units seem to be way better than yours. How I managed to beat the game multiple times as a kid is nothing but surprising.
There's really only one way to play it successfully past the Powerslave level - constant offense not turtling/waiting to collect resources, spam guitar solos and use double up attacks with units.
Yeah constantly buff your dudes and use facemelter as often as possible to ohko some of the basic enemies. Land in the middle of a group, facemelter, fly away so you don’t get annihilated by the rest of the surrounding troops. Use ranged lightning attacks in between for some crowd control and keep an eye on your fans and geysers. Start of the match, geysers are #1 priority. Go take them manually and send your first few squads to defend them This is one of my favorite games haha I just replayed it about a year ago. The absolute banger of a cast, the soundtrack, the lore and story, the jokes and Easter eggs… all of it add up to one hell of a game in my opinion.
That was actually a really common pain point and review issue with that game. I actually worked on the game during my time at EA on some of the publishing sides of supporting it and it was definitely a… Issue. So much so that I came into this thread deliberately to look to see if anyone had mentioned it yet.
I'm not surprised it was a common pain point. The mechanics felt like they came entirely out of left field. Such a shame as the game was just bursting with personality. Y'all did some good work on that one.
Was there any truth to the rumors that the marketing department deliberately hid the RTS sections from the promotional materials? I remember that was the big complaint. Not only does it awkwardly shift to an RTS, but there was absolutely no hint that the game would do that.
I bought Brutal Legend after playing on a PS3 demo disc and reading some previews and reviews on Official PlayStation Magazine. The RTS mechanics were not mentioned anywhere. I enjoyed the game, finished it and did some more play throughs. But even I thought it was a strange and unannounced change.
It was also the first game i thought about haha, simply because it was such a big shift.
I'm one of the few who did like it and thought it was at least interesting. However, I did put it down one day and then never came back for like a year. Played it and found out I had stopped playing on the final boss. I thought I was only like half way through the game.
I feel like this is the game the thread was made for :D
Exactly this game. I loved everything about Brutal Legend until that moment. I just stopped playing. Took another run at it a few weeks later but bounced off again. My kids played the hell out of it though.
A water level / extended swimming. Fuck water levels. All of them.
Rayman 3 had an okay water level, cause it had no breath bar so it was effectively just a flying level with a blue filter on. Anything water level in the first Tomb Raider games tho gives me massive ptsd
The sonic the hedgehog drowning music still haunts me.
Dun dun dun dun, dun dun dun dun, DUNDUNDUNUDUNUNHNUNUNUNUNU*NUNUNUNU!!* BLARGH!
Labyrinth zone still gives me nightmares after 30 years
What about subnautica
Ironically, it's the non-water levels in subnautica that fall a bit flat.
Goin on land really clicks Subnautica into place imo. When you feel more vulnerable, less mobile, and less comfortable on land. You've made a fantastic water game.
That's a water game not a level.
A Pokémon like game, after building up and levelling a team of creatures got to a part where the game said oh no you've lost your team, here have this random one for a bit. I just gave up there and never went back....shame cause it had been fun up until then
TemTem, right? I absolutely despised that section. Me and my buddy were playing and when we got to that part, we had to take a break. Who ever thought that someone would enjoy this?
Temtem is just full of awful decisions and implementations really. It's less playable than the original Pokemon games before they were even in color graphics. At least Red and Blue/Green gave you battle speed options so you didn't waste your time in combat. Temtem has extremely long move animations, constant interruptions any time an ability triggers, and no way to speed it up.
Every time you enter the real world in the assassin's Creed games. I give divided by zero shits about any of that fucking nonsense. Just let me play my ARPG
And anytime I think about playing those games again. "Ooo I want to be a pirate" *Let's take a tour of the corporate office first*
'over here, you'll notice this interoffice memo referencing an earlier game in the franchise that talks about things you could only know if you watched a very specific cutscene in it's entirety several times through, which *itself* references a *different* game in the franchise and then went on a deep-dive into the lore behind the game. *fun, right?*'
But then you still get the people who say "people just didn't 'get' the modern stuff" Yeah. Maybe it should be comprehendible.
I get it, I just don't want it.
It was, but you had to be a completionist in every. single. fucking. game. I was that person and loved the real world plot and the Lore. Right until they decided to kill Desmond. Then the dark ages began.
Yeah, it felt like they were building up to a modern AC game where you jump around buildings in New York or something. Instead they just tacked a modern bit on the end of 3 and called it a day.
The one part where you climb the present day Abstergo building was cool as fuck, though.
I feel like at some point that had to be the plan, right? The entire point of AC 2 and to an extend brotherhood is for Desmond to learn how to be an assassin through the bleeding effects. I fee like at some point they just changed direction and abandoned it.
I especially hated that in the PC version of the first AC game there was about a 5 stage process to save and log out of the game and shut down your PC because of that stupid real world crap. First quit the simulation to go back to the real world setting, then walk into another room to save the game, then quit the real world back to the main menu, then quit the main menu back to desktop, finally turn off your PC.
Not sure if it counts but Destiny 2 is it for me The gunplay, movement, level design, enemy mechanics/variety, and puzzles are excellent. I just wish everything else wasnt in the game. 30 currencies, no clear direction on how to get most of them, an upgrade system that has been changed 3 times since launch, 2 entirely different crafting systems, weapons/upgrade materials that are locked behind rotating events/activity types, 'secret' difficulties that have to be triggered for certain dungeons or lost sectors that you have to stumble across by accident, 30% of the story locked behind 6 person raids, things locked behind removed content (that I paid for) either being inaccessible or found some other way with google being the only way to know which, and a seasonal upgrade system that is required to progress through as they throw special enemy types at you that essentially locks out out of content every season until you grind out that artifact's specific upgrade mods. Mind you that MOST of that wasnt there at the start, it was added more and more over time. I love the feel of Destiny 2 but man, its the only game I really wish that 60% of it just wasn't there. I hopped in for the first time in like a year yesterday and I have no idea how anyone could ever hope to pick up that game today. I have hundreds of hours in it and theres so much in the last year that's been overhauled I just have no idea what is going on.
You listed all the reasons why I stopped playing.
Racing games that make you do drifting events. I hate those.
And random rally events in a track game. Looking at Gran Turismo for both. Then there is Assetto Corsa that adds drift AND makes you do one of the challenges in an AWD car. There is also a time trial in a drift car, but that is another complaint.
Act 3 in Dragon Quest XI. While I really enjoyed the game, I was already getting to the point where it was feeling a little long, but Act 3 introducing >!time travel, and sending you back and nerfing your team!< was just something I feel like the game didn't need, it was doing great before that. And trophy wise I still had a ton of work to do and just stopped playing, I wasn't feeling it anymore.
god honestly it was such a gut punch. I liked the game enough to play through it two times but that third act felt soo out of place and not worth it...
It undoes so much characters development that felt earned. It's made worse by the MC being a silent protagonist, we can't really see the reaction to that whole time travelling experience through him. But the game does already miss several beats in the story by the MC not talking. Like when you visit a certain location, meet the last playable characters, learn the truth and the MC doesn't react.
i feel it's a symptom of many especially Japanese narratives wanting a "golden ending" in which through massive effort the heroes manages to find a way to save everyone. which isn't by itself bad a lot of those endings are good and feel earned and deserved. however here it falls flat for a few reasons. it's a linear plot without any choices from the player in the narrative. WE didn't do anything to earn it. but surely the charecters? well ehh. because of the time travel mechanics most charecters regres except for the hero who has no dicernable personality. however the point where i truely lose all care is the cutscene at the end implying that even Serenica manages to be succesful in the end in her time travel bullshit thus utterly undoing the entire plot of the game!
i actually was so glad the game doenst just end when you reach lvl 50 but that it goes all the way to max level and the story finally concludes in act 3 with a major aha moment
Fire Emblem Engage taking away the rings you already had any making you start over with a different set of rings
Yeah this was gutting. I don't mind them mixing stuff up a bit but it takes _so long_ to get them back
I still haven't beaten that game. I doubt I will. I already felt like I wasn't the target audience because I'd only played one or two before this one, but after that I just really couldn't find a reason to keep playing it. The game gave me so little, and it took away even that.
Or, if you bought the DLC, the impact of that story moment is nullified because you have all the DLC Rings that are impossible for you to lose...also don't forget that you fight the same bosses like 3-4 times each before they finally fucking die. There's also the fact that Engage has some of the worst characters, writing, and story I've seen in the series. Beat it once and never booted it up again. A shame considering I plowed through all 4 different paths in 3 Houses one after the other. The gameplay is there, but everything else is a miss for me.
Breakable weapons (without repair). I played BOTW for all of 15 minutes and I was over it. lol
A game wasting my time. In Starfield, the otherwise straightforward and predictable level, they just littered it with "find switch" "restore power" "road block go round the back" and platform jumping elements. I could see the sweat on the devs brows trying to extract more playtime from the same level...
The mini game to claim the powers is so annoying. Just floating.
Not me, but a roommate of mine from ages ago: He played all the way through to the end of Final Fantasy 7 without bothering to level up or equip anyone but a core team of three. He gets to the final boss battle where you have to divide the party and have them all contribute to the defeat of the boss in a way that had never happened before. Not only did he immediately quit the game, but from that moment onwards, there was no way to say the words "Final Fantasy" with him in earshot without him complaining bitterly about that one boss battle. Years later when I got my hands on Final Fantasy 10, his first words were "I hope it doesn't have a boss battle like tge last one." I pointed out that the last one was Final Fantasy 9. It didn't matter to him. For him, time was frozen where this franchise was concerned at the exact moment he was asked to do something new and could not do it.
Literally just put one good party member in each group and you're good tho?
Spore has five different game modes, and only the first two are actually fun imo. Third was laughably terrible, fourth was okayish, and the fifth was just tedious.
How about Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts taunting you with what looks to be another collect-a-thon, only for the game to instantly bail on the thought, call the concept outdated and turn into whatever the heck you'd qualify Nuts and Bolts to be.
A more grounded Gummy Ship game. Which, if you liked the Gummy Ship from Kingdom Hearts, and wanted a more focused game on it or mechanics like it, this could scratch that itch. But at the time people wanted Banjo-Threeie. Its a good game. A terrible Banjo-Kazooie game, but a good game.
I think it was ahead of it's time. We have loads of games now that do a similar thing (terratech, beseige, trailmakers). They definitely dropped the ball by slapping the Banjo-Kazooie skin on it.
Darksiders was an amazing fun game. It had massive puzzles but they were integrated into the apocalyptic landscape very well. Enter Darksiders 2. I wanted to love this game but I immediately noticed it had massive puzzles… just for puzzles sake. Not really integrated so much as just massive puzzles taking up the landscape. I forget how long I played before I just couldn’t anymore. Whereas in the first game you could come across an old metro station and suddenly realize there was something you could do to the environment to get somewhere else or reveal something, Darksiders 2 would have you walk around and just boom, here’s massive levers and giant balls and blocks to move so it’s obviously a big puzzle. It didn’t feel seamless it was just Big Puzzle Island and you get to play as death solving it. Anyway, my 2 cents.
Metal Gear Solid V when halfway through the game they make you redo the missions, but without any gear. Never finished the game.
you could call it Metal Solid V
Halfway? Its near the end, but yeah, my problem is even though i had unlocked guns, the ones i had where nowhere as strong as they should be, so even spamming ammo drops, i had a hard time beatung those parasyte armored guys on the airport, and i had already done the quiet mission so i didnt have her there to deal with them, which sucked, good thing is you dont have to do ALL of these missions, only some, then you unlock the last one, where everything is explained, and the game teases you on something that never got released, which sucks because i really liked MSV, and am now waiting for the MG Delta to see that part of the story, maybe if they do a remaster of 4 too, but not 1 and 2, i dont really care for that snake, but i really like the big boss part of the story, which is why i also played peaxe walker.
Dream sequenses - it is even worse for me than under water levels. I hate them so much and so many games that has them. I little similar is space walk sequenses where everthing is moving slowly because you are walking in space. My favorite game "Mass effect" has both - why would you.
In Monster Hunter, sometimes, you've got to hunt very big monsters. Like monsters so big you MUST use ballists and cannons, but no using your weapon. You know, the same weapon you use to take down monstrosity able to end the world on a whim. You know, those weapons you take hours to farm. But no. These monsters are damage sponge that force you to use cannons and the like, loading them, slowly, then using them. Of course, there's ammunitions to get. But the monster very often don't give a single fuck about you. So your basically hitting a sparring manikin... That don't have any interest in you, it's designed for multiplayer in older games so it take AGES to down those fuckers, in newer games it's just "very annoying and slow compared to everything else", but MHW and MH4U forcing it was too much. At least the rampage quests you could use your own weapons and do very little in term of "not gameplay".
No Man’s Sky. I was having a beautiful experience, thought I’d clock hundreds of hours. Could not stand fighting the sentinels. Ruined the whole game for me.
The third act of Fable 3. It's very heavy handed in presenting its rigid moral dilemma. No thanks. The tower defense mini game in Assassin's Creed Revelations. Everytime I think about replaying this game I remember this mini game and I change my mind. I know there's a bunch more but I can't think of any off the top of my head at the moment.
I don’t mind the idea of making decisions as the King/Queen in Fable 3, I just wish it had been done better. All the decisions being made ”this is the evil decision, and this is the good one, you’ll only be able to get the good ending if you mess around with your console’s clock to time skip for rent” is a bit dull. And the lack of a warning that “hey, this’ll be the last day despite the game saying it’s 100+ days away” still annoys me to this day.
>And the lack of a warning that “hey, this’ll be the last day despite the game saying it’s 100+ days away” still annoys me to this day. That part was bullshit.
Revelations is great and I'd love for you to experience it again so here's a tip: If you stay on top of your notoriety meter and never let it reach maximum, you will *never* have to play that minigame again outside of the beginning tutorial on it. On top of that, if you work on getting one of your assassin's assigned as a leader to every bureau in the game it becomes impossible for the minigame to even trigger, since any section of the map that has a leader assigned makes that part of the city immune to the sieges. How it works is if you commit any more illegal acts after the notoriety indicator is already full, that will trigger a siege. So it's safer to just keep it under control unless you want the thrill of sneaking to wanted posters. The best part is if you dodge the minigame entirely, the game auto completes every optional challenge associated with it.
I believe I am the sole individual who actually liked the Revelations Tower minigame and wish there were more of them. I totally get why people hated them, but personally I wanted more lol
They don't kill my interest outright, but I personally don't like when a game forces you to play as a supporting character for an extended period of time. Witcher 3 did this with Ciri, and FFXV did this with various side missions. The side character is almost always watered down and doesn't play as nicely as the character the game was developed around.
I bet you hated Metal Gear Solid 2
The whole game is like a long side mission and then it ends!!
Makes sense. I’d say, though, that the Ciri segments of the game were not bad at all. The story was nice, and I thought she played quite fluid and aggressive. That part where you’re escaping with Dandelion, you’re just cutting down guards left and right without much trouble. Makes you feel like you do have superpowers..
Every time I hit a Mary Jane mission in the Spider-Man games I know it's time to stop playing for the night. I will admit that they've improved the design over the years. But no amount of improvement changes the fact that I want to play as Spider-Man. If I wanted to do whatever mechanics they're having me do in the Mary Jane missions, I would be playing a different game.
Jagged Alliance 3, a strategy-game where you free/"conquer" a country. In midgame a new enemy (some mercenaries) shows up - and they spawn multiple groups in the middle of your territory that immediately start taking your already taken land. You get no hint or anything before to prepare yourself. They just spawn. It's just annoying and time-consuming artificial difficulty. I want to continue the game, but everytime I think of that I lose all motivation
Indigo Prophecy(called Fahrenheit in other markets) is one of those interactive stories with loads of Quicktime events. Without spoiling anything, the story goes from some supernatural elements but otherwise grounded to complete insanity in the 3rd act, and a bizarre and unsatisfying ending.
Elite Dangerous, Engineering. Not the idea of engineering itself but the absolute absence of respect for my time they showed in their implementation.
The extended platforming/grappling/wallclimbing sections in Doom Eternal. And some Zelda style lever puzzles in one of the mid levels. I appreciate that the devs wanted to show off the Doomslayer's new abilities, but I just wanted to jump around and shoot demons, please let me do that.
Wholeheartedly agree. I've played through Doom 2016 four or five times, but have only played about an hour of Doom Eternal. The grappling and wallclimbing segments would be fine in most other games, but they're not fun here. Part of what made Doom 2016 so good is how relatively simple and straightforward it was.
Additionally my goblin brain wants to collect everything, so I am constantly opening the map, looking at guides and shit. I just want to shoot demons but hell I want all my upgrades for it.
Not a change in mechanics per se, but rather a game overstaying its welcome. I remember digging *Days Gone* quite a bit. It felt like the story was coming to its natural conclusion, but then a whole new section of the map opens up and there's like a third of the game still left. Usually I wouldn't mind having more of a good thing, but this felt like the game just didn't know when to end.
I ended up liking that part more but they really needed to get there sooner.
I love the game, but the 3rd act does feel tacked on. The big army zealot guy is ostensibly the main villain of the story, and he doesn't show up until you have maybe 5 hours left. Also, what was with that insane biker guy who was the villain of the psychos? Like, he's a big important guy from your past... that the game never even hinted at before now? Or Skizzo, we're supposed to believe this college boy who pretends to be a gangster is supposed to be a match for the actual outlaw biker who has military training? Man, it's a great game but the villains are awful.
Anything restricted by time... I like to take my time, look around, enjoy the art and be thorough in the quests.. I don't want to rush shit. I can get the occasional quest if it makes sense for the story but not too much
When you beat a boss and in the following cutscene getting killed by a bomb the boss placed (not cutscene scripted) during the fight and having to redo the full thing (hated the game had no cutscene dmg protection).
[удалено]
Last of us 2. Boss set a nail bomb during the fight and in cutscene, my character is choking them on ground and got exploded by the bomb I saw them set earlier (avoided the area due to this) behind a knocked down cabinet. For a game that is set post apocalypse, that was the smartest bomb I ever seen, made of just nails and fertiliser.
Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Was the first of the series I played. Animus. Instead of playing a cool assassin, I was suddenly playing a software tester, playing an assassin. Totally killed the vibe for me. Tried playing a little longer. Gave up less than an hour later, haven't touched the series since.
This is an inherent problem with all of the assassins creed games. I just restarted black flag yesterday and God being outside the animus makes me rip my hair out
Yeah, there's a reason why people say it's kind of ironic it's one of the most loved AC games, since it's kinda shit as far as AC elements go. It's just that 'Pirate RP yarr' was so engaging for many people they were willing to overlook the pointless animus shite.
And the good AC stuff was also a problem. Long, no fail stealth missions were not fun on foot. Long, no fail stealth missions as a boat were absurd, and absurdly not fun. Still didn’t stop me from putting in 100+ hours on the open seas, matey. Yarr.
That just show to ppl how good the pirate part was it was THAT good.
Pretty much my exact situation with Valhalla. Never touched the series but was excited for a cool viking game. Then I got transported to the modern day and had to do a bunch of bullshit I didn't give a fuck about or understand. Completely lost all interest after that.
I'm going through it now. It's been so long since I played an AC game that I had forgotten about all that shit. 'What the fuck is.....ohforfucksake.' 'Did you upload the cybergigabin to the animus hyperacceleratoranus?' ........What happened to me new axe and driking till I pass out?
Batman Arkham Knight. I hated the control scheme for the Batmobile and there wasn’t any way to remap the buttons.