Just thought of another one: Missions/quests with time-limits (or turn limits). It's ok if there is the one frantic section (like the "formatting" in TRON 2.0 or the Falling Ship in Jedi Knight), but generally I want to explore and experiment.

I'm going to go ahead and say I love this one. I love "2.5D" (fixed camera 3D) in sidescrollers (like Metroidvanias). It's a great aesthetic, and it works really well. And it's often easier to make it work nicely than the alternative of a full 2d game and drawing "pixel art" with sprites and whatnot.

Otherwise a mostly good list.

Yes! For my entire life of gaming, I've wondered about two things concerning death or loss in a video game.

#1. How do you expect a player to do better on the same challenge, but given fewer tools. Or, how is it you expect someone to succeed without much practice and a heated difficulty?

Dungeons and dragons is especially bad at that at early levels.

#2. Why does loss on a video game have to equate to loss of fun? Some games are fine. Pacman lets you restart. But other games either punish you with a greater challenge or punish you with time delays, rewatching cutscenes, or starting you over (this is fine in some games, not in others).

That gets me to"rogue-likes" that aren't or shouldn't be rogue-likes. Some of these games could be 1hr playthroughs, but instead, they opt for 100h, lots of repeating. But some have just enough difference, challenge and carry-over that I love them. Bardbarian and Rogue Legacy were fantastic for me. For others, I'm sure they have them.


What I've reestablished in this thread is that everyone likes something different. I'm so glad we have so many options for entrainment these days.

And now I'm having Prince of Persia : Two Thrones flashbacks :P

That too:)

Dungeons and Dragons has another issue that plagues many WRPGs (this is one of the things JRPGs changed for the better):

It is very common for attacks to miss.

The thing is, D&D seems to be based around attacks having a 50% accuracy. For example, a character with 20 THAC0 (or +0 attack bonus, if you prefer 3.x or later) attacking an enemy with an AC of 10 will only have a 55% chance to hit; that's too low IMO, and results in battles being a frustrating string of misses (on both sides). If both stats improve at the same rate, the accuracy will be on the low side throughout the game. (In practics, this is not the case, and attacks either end up nearly always hitting or nearly always missing.)

That brings up another, related, issue. In D&D, most of the bonuses you get for combat are to accuracy, not damage. As a result, gaining levels doesn't reduce the number of hits that it takes to kill the enemies, while it does increase the number of hits it takes to kill you. Again, JRPGs handled it better by making damage increase instead, with accuracy being only important in special cases. (I could note that early Final Fantasy games are more like WRPGs in respect to accuracy, but upgrading your weapon provides a huge increase in damage, and accuracy issues are only a problem early on and not much of one; pluse, your characters aren't going to die in one or two hits from easy enemies.)

Incidentally, one other gimmick I dislike from older D&D based games: spell disruption. I want to be able to actually use my abilities, and it is frustrating when the game simply does not let me do this.

For some reason I'm reminded of this article.

Luckily, I guess, I haven't played enough games to run into many of these things mentioned here, but I do have another vote for QTEs.

Actually, I've been lucky enough to play so few games, that I haven't encountered QTEs.
Bet the moment I get one, I'll spit the dummy.

There are a ton of gimmicks I hate but the one that stands out the most is gameplay-affecting lootboxes (gacha).

Other contenders:

Permadeath, save points, or any other attempt to control how and when I save the game (except restricting saving in combat to simplify save file format; saving NPC AI state can be tricky).

Consumable-based meta, including every item wearing out or needing to be maintained. IMO, balancing a game around consumables produces a toxic state of balance where good players can lose because they didn't bring enough supplies while bad players can throw a fridge full of potions at a "challenge" and win.

Any type of forced no-mistakes-allowed situation. Instant fail stealth appears to be commonly hated here, although I'd like to extend the definition to include effectively dying in 1 hit against enemies considered balanced for your level. This also includes ridiculous stun-lock and disabling mechanics where if you don't dodge them, the game takes the keyboard and mouse out of your hands.

Progress-blocking puzzles mixed into what should be a combat-based RPG or action game. If I want a puzzle game, I will play a puzzle game.

"Hardcore" leveling where there are a fixed maximum number of skill points that you can ever get on a character - and no way to refund them or unreasonable refund cost *glares at Grim Dawn*. Nonrefundable skill points with theoretically infinite character leveling (and therefore access to further skill points) don't count as "hardcore", for example in Might and Magic 6-8, since you can keep farming exp and get new skill points to make up for whatever you wasted.

Excessive RNG and other mechanics that ignore player skill. There is nothing fun about having to roll a virtual d20 or similar and get arbitrarily punished because you rolled the wrong number. Another common offender is enemies in ARPGs that to unreasonable amounts of damage, move unreasonably fast, and are immune to slows or crowd control so you have no opportunity to escape. In short, anything where there's no skill-based counterplay is bad design.

Un-fun levels of realism.

"Fanservice" or nudity of any kind that a game shoves in your face. (*glares at Japan*) If it's heavily hidden and easily skipped, I'll skip it.

Pen & paper mechanics in a video game. Those are 2 things that should never be mixed and it's been a clunky failure of a mess every time I see it happen.

Online only in a game that clearly should support offline. (*glares at Blizzard and Diablo 3*)

No respawns or resets (in an RPG). This mean every interaction in the game is disposable for all practical purposes and your progression itself is fundamentally disposable. A major exception to this rule: New Game Plus, where you can import a finished save file - this serves as a minimalistic "respawn" where you respawn the whole game after finishing.

Boring martial combat systems in fantasy RPGs that are basically "regular attack, power attack, or block". This covers a surprisingly large number of games from D&D to Elder Scrolls (before Skyrim). Back in the old days I would play Oblivion with this mod that adds MMORPG-style combat skills to melee and ranged.

D&D style passive, RNG-based counterplay like what dtgreene mentioned earlier; where defense (counterplay vs. attacks) is mostly upgrading your armor class and saves in the hopes you don't get hit and spell disruption (counterplay vs. magic) is a straight-up dice roll. I much prefer the new standard that the original Guild Wars (IMO the best MMORPG mechanics ever in the history of the genre that have yet to be matched again) set, where attacks have no chance to miss by default (you only fail to hit if you have a debuff or your intended target has a block/evade buff; there's no spell disruption or even WoW-like casting pushback - to interrupt enemies, you use an interrupt skill, some of which throw in additional punishments on interrupted enemies).

You do realize that that unbeatable scorpion was only in the pirated version of the game? The devs uploaded it to TPB themselves, just to mess with pirates!

yeah I know. It was my way of stressing a point about how hard some of the actual bosses are in some of those legally purchased games.

I have a kind of similar but much worse story. Several years ago, a cousin and I were playing a copy of Constructor that came with a gaming magazine, and they obviously went for the localized portuguese version.

We were enjoying the game until we started having trouble with one mission that demanded (I'll translate to english here) "You must build 5 houses of three floors (plus furnishings), etc. in one city block". Failing this mission was an immediate game over.

We thought it was weird. Only the biggest block in that city map would be big enough for the task and you could have been unlucky enough to have already used it for other stuff (or worse, it could be owned by a competitor). Moreover, nowhere in the game so far it was stated how many floors a house had. It was simply not a game mechanic. Yet we failed the mission over and over. It got to the point that my cousin was analyzing sprites of houses to try and ascertain how many floors there were.

In a flash of inspiration after several more defeats I told him that it had to be a mistranslation. We downloaded a pira... err, an online backup in the original english and the mission read like this: "You must build three level-five houses plus furnishings in one city block".

If I could kill the guy responsible for localization that day...

(Just in case you haven't played Constructor : House levels are a game mechanic. Houses level one are available when you only have a sawmill, level two unlock after you create a cement factory, etc., No relation to floors whatsoever)

I'd argue that bringing enough consumables is part of being a good player; a player who loses due to not bringing enough consumables is not a good player. Maybe that player should plan better next time?

Furthermore, throwing the "fridge full of potions" at a challenge, if allowed by the game, is certainly a legitimate strategy. Just compare it to the alternative strategies a player could use to get past that point, like leveling up, or practicing that part of the game; all of them take time.

(One thing: Consumables need to be good enough to be worth using; if nonconsumables are as good or better than consumables, the consumables have no purpose.)

Other situations that shouldn't count as "hardcore":
* Skill learning is separate from leveling, and doesn't have its own cap. (Final Fantasy V)
* There exists an infinite number of an item that grants extra skill points. (Avernum 1-3 (but not the recent remakes), some Dragon Quest games (though DQ8 comes close to "hardcore" in this sense; one of the reasons I don't like that DQ game as much).
* There is a way to lower your level without losing skills or skill points (DQ9 does this).

The worst QTE are after a long cut scene where you've started reading the paper or gone for a cuppa.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned on that really pisses me off, the Equipment Strip.

Even if you get back your equipment you still have to work out what was where and fight the intervening period without your prize gear.