What's that one mechanic that video games often try, but more often completely fail at it?

open world

i think open world is just not done right.

I've yet to see an open world game that subverts these.

At least hyrule warriors made those things not shit but those two items always soured me when it came to twilight princess

Procedural generation

It's an interesting concept which requires a lot of technical work to actually bear fruits, but most hacks just do it because they fell for the 'infinite replayability' meme alongside their games being 'roguelike' which in practice ends up with the player having to fight through preset rooms arranged in a somewhat different order on top of varying enemy and item spawns. The whole 'each time you get a different unique playthrough' shtick can only works if the game mechanics are actually tied to create a massive opportunities.

Case in point, The Binding of Isaac makes it work by having a FUCKTON of items which can also synergize with eachother in many unique ways, on top of boatloads of unique consumables, trinkets, enemy modifiers, map layouts, and so on. In this case it works because it has a large amount of content which can also synergize in order to create unique effects.
Another example is Dwarf Fortress, which accomplishes this by randomly generating and keeping track of staggering amount of variables, ranging from history, geography, dwarven psychology, dwarven physiology, to the generation of cosmic horrors and dangerous outside factors. Each playthrough in Dwarf Fortress is truly an unique one, for so many factors have been randomly generated and can actually have some kind of impact on your playthrough to a varying extent.

A bad example is No Man's Sky, where the infinite amount of randomly generated planets doesn't fucking matter, because you'll end up doing the same shit regardless of what planet you're on, the results look silly as all hell, and the more meaningful modifiers are more or less easy to deal with.

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I know several autists doubling as math dorks who love making predictions and calculating probabilities. Think of the pokemon franchise and check the "catch rate" page on bulbapedia for a good example of RNG-fueled autism.

funny how fucking Ocarina of Time does this shit better than games to this day.

RNG Lootcrates in a multiplayer game. TF2 and CSGO literally ruined all of gaming with this shit.

I'd still be playing COD if it wasn't for this shit.

In Ocarina it's pretty much every wooden/latticed object, right?

Social links/ friendship rankings with other characters

anything that is either wooden, a target, latticed or chests (which are wooden but I feel should get a special mention.)

Oh also paralyzes a lot of generic monsters you fight which is sort of nice.

Most of the times choices are made through a dialog box where all options are laid out before the player but some are blocked. There is almost no decision making through action and there is no place for independent thought and problem solving.
The example of a moment where this was done well that comes to my mind is Fallout 2, when you approach Vault City guard in a default vault dweller clothing.

Dyinglight has a grappling hook that is unrestricted and actually works well.

I remember getting dozens of items in Zelda 3 but only regularly using two or three to beat the game.

Even in Breath of the Wild, I try my best in avoiding using the four Runes, square bombs is the only one I use constantly.

I wonder if I'd use more items if I had a quick-button for them, as in Metroid Prime were the 4 weapons could be quickly switched by pressing the d-pad. No game pausing, this was done while the action was ongoing.

Just Cause 2 & 3 and Titanfall 2 have ones that can be used on anything, off the top of my head.

Procedural generation
Most games just use it as a shortcut to avoid making handcrafted content and as a crutch to get easy added replayability and end up with shit generation that fails to do anything that it sets out to do
A good recent example is Necropolis- different floors might have different tilesets, but each set is just a collection of 20 or so pre-built rooms that are stitched together between the entrance and exit like a shitty minecraft dungeon mod, and gets old before you've even finished one playthrough

This shit is frustrating because even though there can be some complicated math in the background depending on how it's done, on the surface good procedural generation doesn't seem hard to figure out at all, even at a basic level it's just a matter of making enough individual assets and setting places and conditions for them to spawn, but nobody wants to do that much work

That doesn't seem like a good example. It shows a list of actions, not choices. You do have to make a choice (between killing and sparing/running), but the actions shown don't map to those options, and you don't get an indication that you're making a choice that has consequences outside game mechanics. There are far worse instances of decision making in the same game.

RNG is kinda a fundamental aspect of many rpgs, with combat largely being about you manipulating your stats so the dice rolls are in your favor.

I've seen some pure cancer implementations of it though that should have never been done.

Why

Good implementation of RNG can add a lot to games in the sense of adapting to a situation and having to strategize. But that involves the game being rich enough to give you a wide selection of usable strategies that don't actually rely on RNG much themselves.

This is precisely why I've always wanted to see Nintendo do a PC Zelda. They are extremely limited in what they can do with items since you can only have a couple on hand and going into menus to switch items in and out is tedious as hell and not fun, it's a huge part of why nobody likes the Water Temple in OoT, always having to switch your steel boots on and off for example. The amount of hotkeys you can have on PC is ridiculous, just counting the number keys and function keys, that's 22 items on hand, if you assign two items that you can switch between on each key then that is fucking 44 items, with no need to ever see any fucking menu or tediously scroll through shit. I would kill for a mod/hack for classic Zeldas that lets you hotkey shit like a motherfucker.

That's like saying shotguns are bad weapons. It depends on how the developer uses them

Dota 2 doesn't even have true RNG. The system is rigged so it will have an abnormally high chance to proc within a certain range of chances, and wont have like 4-5 procs in a row. Plus the way dota 2 uses RNG is to discourage you from doing shit like, fighting uphill since you have a 20% missrate, forcing you to go out of position (in a game entirely about positioning) so you do more damage overall. It also is used to tilt things in someones advantage slightly. Like if you use radiance to push a wave, they gave radiance a 15 or so miss chance to everyone effected by it, which doesn't really mean shit for fighting but for split pushing with illusions your creepwave will take way less damage by the time it gets to the tower.

Basically learn how the game works. RNG is like bacteria that helps digestion in a body riddled with cancer.

if you honestly think Nintendo would take advantage of PC input and hardware then you haven't been paying attention to their half-assing.

without some element of chance everything boils down to math and routine. its a cheap way to add excitement, but it works

You already have a couple items you can switch to quickly without menus starting in Ocarina of Time. The Wii U games let you just pick from the touchscreen if you want, which seems to be exactly what you want. They're all right there for you to switch to at any moment.

The Water Temple was only stupid because you had to go to the menu to switch instead of letting you set the boots to a C button like almost any other item. This had absolutely nothing to do with the platform, and was simply a poor design choice.

PCfags are annoying as fuck.

Difficulty modes. There's a tendency for it to mean "enemies have more health and do more damage, with an extra mechanic or two thrown in sometimes".

Stop eating shit you inferior cunt.

Name me an example of RNG done right then.

determining the trajectory of a coin coming out of a bob-omb explosion in Mario 64.

I would rather just be able to press a key while remaining completely focused on the game.

Shit, I'm having hard time explaining this properly even to myself.
What I meant was that a character for example has a certain number of possible reactions in response to actions of the player. In most cases those reactions are caused by choosing an option from a list.
It is unavoidable when it comes to dialogue but what I would like to see is more games having an option to cause a reaction through a mechanic other than dialogue box.

I admit that UT was a bad example because for a turn-based rpg it has quite a lot neat moments like betrayal-kill, triggering genocide run or eating that spider food in front of Muffet. But those "actions" to me seem like a test where each question has it's own set of unique few options instead of being open-ended.

Example from modern game, Pillars of Eternity.
In the beginning when you travel with caravan there is an option to murder the people you travel with. After doing this the game recognizes it as a valid way of advancing the story.
This possibility could be presented through dialog, giving you an option to say:
And after that NPCs would turn hostile and the battle would start.
But in Pillars there isn't such dialogue option, instead you have an "attack button" that let's you attack things, and combining attack with friendlies results in betrayal. Instead of saying you will betray someone you do it.

Shit, I hope that makes sense.

tf2 crits

>ITS NOT OVER, IT TURNS OUT THIS BOSS IS ONLY JUST GETTING STARTED and proceed to have an even more awesome fight using more complex Spinner skills.

Also one of the few items adult Link can use underwater.

>no perfect parries that actually benefits you more than a normal parry i'm looking at you furi
why even bother?

Outside of the last two phases of The Edge, you always get a decent amount of free damage.

Well someone beat the boss while only using a lepper and three pleage docs basiclly buffed himself so much that he killed the boss in one hit. I really hate how that game honestly works, espeilly on the hard dungons where places like the wareins become a living fucking hell because ememy's have attacks that hit a 3 of your party for fucking insane damage and blight you at the same time, suck my fucking dick because that right there is just rape.

Oh man that game was disappointing, plenty of moments where the diamond in the rough shined through but they blew it in the end.

Morality systems.

Instead of giving players choices where there is no right or wrong answer, players get the good option or the evil option.
Instead of playing a character who has to make decisions that affect other characters with consequences that may not be clear until later, the player is either a goody two-shoes or a dick.
The worst part is that it discourages 'good' characters from doing 'bad' things and discourages 'bad' characters from doing 'good' things. If you want to be a dick then you have to be a dick or you'll gain antidick points, and you don't want that.

the first Fallout had an (unfortunately, cut from the final game) ending for a specific town where killing the obviously evil local crime boss would make the town eventually become desolate because the economy he brought in was gone, while killing the lawful good sherrif would make it flourish, but be a criminal hotbed

It's still better than other fucking trash thats been out around, I mean I actually enjoy it over binding of issac but that game gets bullshit real quick, but at least its up front about it, were several floors down in issac you only know after already being fucked hard.

that's pretty stupid too. why is there no option to kill the crime boss and then help them flourish afterwards? it's just sophomoric "le good things aren't actually good" bullshit.

You can't just say "RNG" without explaining what you mean, user. (pseudo)random number generation is used in a myriad of ways in video games.

I remember being a bit letdown when playing KOTOR because of this.
Option 1: Rescue the kitten for the orphan.
Option 2: Rape the orphan's tender butthole.
Option 3: I see. Goodbye.

He forces you to choose a party member to kill every 1/3rd of his health, so it only happens twice in the fight, less if you cheese the game via leper crits. I know the game is bullshit in a variety of different ways, especially the final boss, but at least get your facts right.

Who the fuck gets immersed in a Zelda game?

fags and fujoshis if the newest game is any indication.

That isn't how it's already been for 20 years?

99.99999% of these are absolute fucking garbage. They are only okay in the following situations:

Most games that try this either have massively unbalanced sidegrades meaning you just choose the obvious good one OR there's no real distinction between them (like assault rifles in COD) so it doesn't really matter which one you pick.
Level scaling absolutely destroys this as does any game that has you doing the same shit the whole game just with bigger numbers. Oblivion is a great example in the same series because the core gameplay is pretty much the same from when you start out to when you're super powerful, you just have bigger numbers. Meanwhile in Morrowind you're speeding around at 400 speed doing super jumps and breaking just about every gameplay mechanic, plus the enemies scale to you in Oblivion so you're not even better at combat in the late game.
These usually suck dick because they often result in one team/player snowballing which makes the game trivial for someone who is slightly better and impossible for someone who is slightly worse.
These usually suck because overprotective devs feel the need to make sure that the player can't accidentally have too much fun experimenting with the game mechanics. It's only maybe good if a game is absurdly complicated but there should still be a way for an experienced player to circumvent this so they don't have to wait to have fun. But even then you might as well let the player do whatever they want and just not tell them how to do it in the beginning.

really not sure which is worse.

I'm agdging a Zelda like game and one of the things I have in my combat design document is specifically for this:

The worst is upgrades that are so careful and neutered that it feels like an insult to even take them. I love choosing between +5% damage to skill X or 0.5s shorter cooldown on skill Y, maybe if I focus on one of these for the entire fucking game it might end up being useful but I won't find that out for thirty hours.

What? Take the CDR, that means the skill is active longer. Intangible benefits always trump raw damage.

not if that move becomes arbitrarily shit later down the line.

It's not a fun or interesting choice no matter how the math works out over the course of a playthrough.

Voice acting isn't a mechanic, but when it's done well it adds little and when it's done poorly it fucks up everything else. Rarely is it done well.

Instancing is cancer. Shit has gotten so bad that depending on what quests you've done you'll see NPCs, even monsters, that other players can't.

This has without a doubt absolutely killed the entire genre of RPGs, the easiest comparison to make is between Morrowind and Oblivion where one game didn't have full voice acting meaning devs could give generic responses to every NPC and write a lot more, meaning you could ask anyone for directions or general things about the world. Additionally, if you look at Ob/Sk their most well-known mods include stuff like Falksaar since it's one of the only actual content mods for the game, but in Morrowind there are tons of mods of similar or greater size because modders aren't limited by the need to hire voice actors.

Lastly it just gets fucking annoying when you hear the same line over and over again, silence is far better than that shit no matter how good the acting is. The exception I'll give is if its a generic line that is extremely short, like a grunt or something. I think the ideal solution for everyone would be to record a bunch of generic grunts to convey emotion/voice and writers can just assign them to lines which is exactly what some VNs do (in addition to making matching nice looking poses rather than shitty autogenerated lipsync). That way you can read at your own pace, the writers can do whatever they want, and you still get the main benefits of voice acting. Plus you'd have to try pretty hard to fuck up the acting for that in comparison to actually saying entire sentences (and a lot of them).

/semirant

Witcher 3? Leveling seemed so pointless and bland.
You just stare at the skill tree and can't decide which to pick because they all seem like shit.

Particle effects
Some instances of procedural textures for things like dirt, dust, and wear
Pretty much anything that doesn't directly fuck with the mechanics of the game.

Swimming.

If you can't make it not shit, then why include it at all?

Binding of Isaac.
Diablo.

Card games. "Draw a random X" is good.

Reminded of the endings for Primm in FNV; if you have the NCR annex the town, they grumble about higher taxes and charge you more in the store but, presuming an NCR ending, the town thrives. (they get extra fucked over in the others, though) While the other sheriffs have their ups and downs; Meyers is popular but belligerent, gets everyone killed in a Legion ending and in the other endings occasionally kills people based on gut instinct, while Primm Slim is middle of the road, and crooks sometimes get away because he's so slow.

The problem is the more 'open-ended' you want to make a game, the more absurd levels of effort you have to go to for absolutely every combination of actions that a player can take, knowing that you may well be making content that only a tiny minority of players will see and even fewer will care about.

Morality systems have problems because they give the illusion of choice when in practice it railroads players down particular paths once they figure out how it works. Undertale knows it- Pacifist and Genocide are both distinct gameplay styles you have to commit to, though there's a lot of potential dialogue for killing only a few people.

I don't think QTEs have ever been done well. We'd probably be better off if they vanished and never returned.

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would pics related be considered qte? or is it spiced up turn-based combat?

Tell that to roguelike players. And they can compete too (if only indirectly) for highscores.

Those don't count. I love those, actually. I think of QTEs as "Press X repeatedly to run from the boulder and watch this dumb movie play!"

In MonHun I understand that the game is made for you to hunt the same monsters over and over so you git gud and farming their shit also gives extra resources and materials at the end of the hunt. In dark souls I just want to get this fucker's armor. If it was at least sold somewhere or it is in a chest in the world like bloodborne has for all their armors, I'd be fine, but you need to farm the fuck out of their armors by killing the same enemy in the same place over and over, and the trek to the bonfire, to the enemy, then back to the bonfire is usually so long that it's often worthless to try.

Homeward Bones or the homeward miracle make it go by faster.

weapon degradation

at best, it adds to a game's immersion with weapons/armor becoming less effective the more they degrade (like gun jamming in New Vegas)

at worst, it becomes a major annoyance with weapons/armor breaking frequently

it becomes especially annoying when some breakable items are required to progress or when items that are normally very durable in real life are brittle as fuck in-game (webm related)

But that's time reloading the area. It's just all wasted time trying to get pieces of armor.

wew

I just want to fight big bosses with my friends, not sit around fighting the local blacksmith for a sharper sword.

I've been noticing a lot lately that any game with a crafting system will have a fucking awful interface for it. It's not really a mechanic, but heavily linked to the functionality of one and how enjoyable it is to use. So fuck crafting systems for this reason.

It's such a treat to actually see an efficient UI with everything you would want to know on display. Even better if it's also aesthetically pleasing with style and customizable.

like said, it doesn't count. That's more like min-game and a bit of fun.

QTEs in modern times usually means press X to dodge thing or else game a game over. Button mash this thing for whatever reason. It's bullshit. It all started with RE4 as just something the japs did over the weekend. They probably still laugh that everyone is still ripping off that shit gimmick to date. And ironically Re4 is still the one who did it the least-shit in that style.

Most "roguelike" mechanics. Worst of the bunch is by far permadeath and "progression". Both are done so horribly wrong in most cases, that it just leaves the games dazed, reeling and about to break.

I didnt mind it as much in Dying Light since the weapon gradually got more and more visually broken and when you fixed them, it actually visably changed the weapon with metal splints and such Also it was funny as fuck beaning people Patches O'Houlihan-style with your broken, super-rare wrench

Hacking

FFs on PS1 are the best FFs.

QTE's are cool when they don't take over actual gameplay sections. Assassin's creed's bossfights being "press X twice" is shit but I like when you have to hit a few inputs during a cutscene like in MGR

Open world

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Fishing. I can't think of a single game in which it isn't incredibly mundane. Combined with the RNG mechanics it is just frustrating.

Fishing in Breath of fire 3/4 is pretty fun

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Even most stealth games can't get stealth right.

I feel the exact Opposite about Fishing. I fucking love when I can Fish in a game, even if it's mechanics are weak.

Jagged Alliance 2.
Also D&D RNG is seemingly less noticable when personified in real time.

Those are action commands, not QTEs.
QTEs are mandatory, "press button to do thing" events that happen in a single scen and don't follow the rules of the game, while action commands are simply another rule in the game, like the hammer or multi-jump in Paper Mario.

It's more about how little impact the "upgrade" actually has though.
If the lore says that the upgrade comes from super-intense training that kills 3/4 of its attendees, it should damn well be bigger than a fucking 5% change.

Combine these two and you have the absolute worst cancer to have infected vidya.
It's bad enough to have to grind for shit to craft other shit, but its worse when you need to do it again an hour down the line because the thing you made broke.
Doubly fuck this shit when you need to craft every consumable in the game.
Only upside is it fixes the problem of having an inventory slot eaten by shit you'll never use again because you crafted everything that needs it EXCEPT IT STILL HAPPENS

Nigger I will fucking turn your bones into charcoal and make your fucking meat bits into fly food for saying this

Does no one else find it immersion breaking when every single enemy is a complete fucking dumbass?

Asura's wrath.

It actually uses them in intersting ways, especially for the DLC.

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Procedurally generated anything. Seriously, why is this shit so popular? Oh wait, I know why. It's because shitty devs don't want to invest time on antiquated things like level design, enemy and item placement, or even fucking enemy and weapon designs in some cases and concurrently tout how "NO TWO GAMES ARE DIFFERENT," despite the fact that a simple algorithm has only so many options and that the time spent developing and fine tuning a decent one(which is almost never the case) would be better used just designing levels with unique layouts.
This shit seriously pisses me off to no end.

I don't know about you man, but if I see some bionic man pick up a fucking vending machine like it was nothing and then just hide behind it like a crazy person, I would play along too.

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no dude u just don't get it. Having this room you've seen a thousand times before and this other room you've seen a thousand times before in slightly different places and maybe a different color means its an entirely unique experience every time. You'll clearly get thousands of hours of gameplay out of it instead of just getting bored after a half hour and uninstalling it.

C-stick

Yeah, the on-the-fly weapon swapping and beam combinations were so damn useful, but also, nothing in metroid every felt useless except the diffusion missiles in Fusion considering they are used for one damn passage and have no purpose beyond that.

Yeah I don't think that's ever been addressed properly.

Where is it where you just get a result for actions you took? no condemning or praising involved?

It can be entertaining if done right.

Because real map design is hard and if you just use procedural generation you don't need to make real maps.

Witcher games do morality and choices well. No meter to grade you, consequences aren't always apparent and can show up later.

While I really enjoyed how they did it in the Witcher, I also do not think that the "your choices will result in misery either way" route is the best thing either. It might go against the theme of the game, but a happy fairy tale ending wouldn't be bad option to have in some cases. Also, one a side note, the whole trend of dark, gritty and depressing automatically meaning good, mature quality content in the mainstream really must go away.

RNG based player movement when?

Mario party

Counterpoint: 90% of RNG-based abilities would be functionally identical if you replaced them with "procs every X hits" like HotS does. People even game it the same way, e.g. going to gank as PA after hitting a creep 5 times and not critting. There's no reason to even allow shit like 3 consecutive crits or 8 consecutive hits without, even in theory. It's an arbitrary dice roll where none is actually necessary.

Do I even need to tell you that your opinion is wrong? Cause it is.