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From: Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: Gamplay "mechanics" you don't like?
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2024 18:19:04 -0800
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On 12/19/2024 8:45 AM, Justisaur wrote:
> Or is it just game dev decisions?
> 
> Mike S. mentioned a few things in another thread, and I thought it would 
> be an interesting topic. Or at least an opportunity to rant a lot.
> 
> Grinding - I'm o.k. with a little bit, especially if I can kill two 
> birds with one stone, such as in ER where I test out weapons on 
> albernaics and get souls (money/xp) at the same time.  If I have to do 
> it a lot in one spot against the same thing over and over I don't like 
> it.  Of particular mention would be something like killing silver 
> knights in DS3 for the blue sentinel's for something like 20 hours. 
> Though that's probably a bad example as I did that grind by helping kill 
> invaders along the way instead, but many people complain about it, and 
> now there's not enough people playing to do that.  If it's offline 
> without chance of getting banned I'm fine with cheating that sort of 
> thing after I've proven I can do it regularly without loosing anything 
> but time.  BL 2 had really bad drop tables, and was similar, I ended up 
> cheating to change the % rarity drops there.  I'd rather not cheat and 
> just have the devs make it reasonable.
> 
I have to admit that a lot of the games I play involve a fair amount of 
grind but I don't mind too much as long as I feel like I'm making 
progress and the grinding isn't excessive.

> Backtracking - don't like it, especially if it's a lot, a little bit is 
> o.k.  I particularly don't like where like in some of the older games 
> you'd have to go find a key to an area and go back repeatedly.
> 
Like you say, a little, okay.  Too much and "meh".

> Open World - if there's not interesting things to do you can stumble 
> upon, and it gets repetitive boring or like driving through endless 
> fields I hate this. I feel like Fallout 3 is the only one that did this 
> fairly well.  Possibly ER as there's not a lot repetative, but it's just 
> too big, really that's the only game I've ever felt was way too big 
> long, so it doesn't deserve it's own general complaint.
> 
Open world is hard to do well apparently.  One suspects because it takes 
time and money for game makers to FILL all that "open" with something 
worthwhile.

> Inventory Management and Junk - So much junk and often poor inventory 
> management in RPGs, pretty much all bethesda games fail on this, BG3 as 
> well.  I don't want to spend my time doing organizational inventory chores.
> 
Another thing that a lot of developers can't seem to properly balance. 
They want to add a little "realism" or challenge but they just can't 
seem to hit the sweet spot.

> Puzzles - Although I've been seeing better puzzles of late, in the past 
> you pretty much had to have internet or cheat books to get past some 
> puzzles in games that use them much.
> 
I'm not a puzzles kind of person.  And one sub-set of this that I hate 
is when the game forces you into doing parkour.  That jump, bounce, 
slide over/around/through obstacles for no real reason.  THAT will make 
me drop a game real quick.

> Easily broken quests - I'm looking at you Fromsoft.  The Selvius Quest 
> for the Magic Scorpion Charm I couldn't complete on either of my 
> attempts at a mage, and ER especially with it's length and no save 
> backups (and even if it did often times being broken so far back that 
> you wouldn't want to play over 20 hours again to fix it.)
> 
I'm not sure that really qualifies as a "game mechanic".  Just a bug 
they refuse to patch.

> No save backups - Again Fromsoft, yes you can set up an auto save backup 
> mod, but in this day and age it should be part of any game, even if it's 
> only once an hour or something in case something goes horribly wrong 
> corrupting your game.
> 
"Get gud noob!"  Hate that.  Just bad design for no reason based on 
fantasies of how "good" rogue like games are.

> Limited character slots - especially RPGS, MMOs, and again Fromsoft.  I 
> want to try a number of different characters and/or builds.  I have 4 or 
> 5 backup saves in DS3 with mostly different characters.  Why can't I 
> have more than 10 characters saved?
> 
Not really an issue for me.  I basically stick with one character until 
I finish the game.

> Unnamed/badly organized saves - Fallouts and Cyberpunk are bad with 
> this, you can't easily change between characters as there's nothing 
> easily telling you what saves are what.
> 
One should ALWAYS be able to name a save.  Otherwise what's the point of 
allowing multiple saves?

-- 
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky 
dirty old man.