shitty loot behind locks, especially locks that requires you to level up… You mean i spent all this time levelling up my lock picking skills only to unlock common items?!

Fear of missing out (FOMO), such as £20 battle passes and bloody seasons. I can’t stand having seasons in games, also overpriced skin bundles.

Open world games with that one location you can’t get back to. This isn’t exactly modern, but I still wanted to mention it.

“player gear/loot” which is really just a BS way to get micro transactions in the game. Harry Potter is a perfect example of gear which makes no sense thematic and was extremely boring loot.

Also “crafting” which is just shoehorned in and makes no sense, like you can’t take a clip from one gun and put it on another of the same gun… Starfield is an example of where they had a ton of options for crafting but the system was just garbage and pointless anyway

Ultrarandomized loot.

Nothing’s a bigger turnoff than going into a game expecting that gear or loadouts will be strategic in any way and then finding out that every enemy barfs out armor or weapons with different numbers on them and you’ll have to occasionally stop in the middle of an action sequence to figure out which color coded bit of nonsense has more numbers than which other color coded bit of nonsense.

Just let me finish my dungeon/mission/quest/whatever, get some rewards from it, and then go and buy upgrades. I don’t want my next new awesome weapon to come off of killing some random snail or robin or some shit.

• Quests where you have to run around the city and talk to NPCs or deliver items.

• Loading screens. It’s 2024 almost if you are spending $200 million on a game and contain loading screen to open a door. What is wrong with you?

• This will be controversial with mostly children here. But forced Romance quests. You are wasting my time plus not everyone is playing in comfort of being alone at home.

• OP Slow down time mechanics. Games are great and you enjoy them until you unlock this mechanic and everything becomes extremely easy and you abuse it.

• Exploits in games devs ignored to patch or never found in years of development. Many games have exploits players find in first few days of the release which breaks whole economy and reason to follow game progression levelling up path. Always having best equipment.

• Very Hard should balance most powerful skills or add new mechanics not just buff enemies health and damage. You can be OP on Easy or Normal abuse the game but some of use want to play on Very Hard to be anxious fighting strong enemies or maybe even run from them.

Probably many more.

Enemies scaling with level. I hate it. It’s a terrible design in my opinion.

It’s so much better to have enemies leveled by zone than automatically with the player. This way the player can actually feel powerful in that area before moving onward to the next. Scaling with level ruins that power fantasy that people want to have with their character.

Alternatively it also makes specific enemies in other zones that much more terrifying to fight because you know they’ll be difficult.

escort missions with slow escortees.

Quick Tim events, end thread

Having to crawl/shimmy through transitional walls to get to another part of a map. I swear one game did it and every game after that thought it would be cool to do it too.

Always online connection for single player games. You bought a game for $60-70, and you can’t even play it without internet.

Having a powerful main character and still taking multiple attacks or hits to defeat common enemies. Sure a video game where I can easily match through every enemy would be boring I agree. Especially when games have disproportionate character power in cutscenes versus actual gameplay.

Micro transactions, battle passes, loot boxes that are gambling and not a fun unlock system that will eventually give everything, stat increase meta progression, invincible phases of boss fights that make the boss over stay it’s welcome, unskippable tutorials and bad tutorials for beginners that barely explain the game. Games being revealed years in advance if they aren’t ready to release within a few months. AAA corporate greed screwing over devs into making bad games because rush for money resulting in broken ass buggy games with lack of content often regurgitated from the previous game,