Whats the worst game mechanic?
Whats the worst game mechanic?
Comments
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Game has collectables scattered in almost every room including lore text and audio logs.
Meanwhile the story NPC is nagging you to move on every 30 seconds on a loop and won't shut the fuck up. Because play testing revealed most of their players are fucking morons and get lost in one way apartment rooms I guess.
These two mechanics conflct with one another way too often and it's immersion breaking every time.
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Fuck, this annoys me so much. The new-ish sony games are awful with it (Spider-man and GoW at least), providing beautiful, intricate worlds and levels to explore, but if you aren't sprinting toward the next objective at every moment, it constantly bombards you with little nagging voicelines from npcs or even the main character themselves. I hate it.
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Act 1 BG3 was pretty bad about this. I thought the tadpole plot was going to be resolved in Act 1!
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It's very important that we find a healer or we're going to die! But also, you can only get one camp interaction per rest so take your time~
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THAT'S NOT GOING TO WORK!
TRY SOMETHING ELSE!
USE THE TADPOLE!
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First game that came to mind was RD2. I remember a mission at the beginning, where you're meant to clear out some Plinkertons from a house, and I remember one of the camp NPCs asking you to look around for supplies (or maybe something specific).
As soon as you're able to leave the area, Dutch starts screaming at you to hurry tf up. A friend and I will occasionally quote him when we're being jokingly impatient with one another: "C'MON ARTHUR, QUIT HORSIN' AROUN'! WE AIN'T GAHT ALL DAAAY!"
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Insert real world money to continue/for advantage. Whether it's modern FTP with MTX or old school quarter eaters, it's poison to games.
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Absofuckinglutely.
I also hate that gamers in general have been so cooked in mtxs they don't even realize that pay to skip grind is still ptw because you get more options than other players.
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Not a mechanic i guess, but motion blur
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If that counts then in-game rendered intros on first launch running in 720p and you can't change video/display settings until after the game finally gives you control.
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I played Assassin's Creed Origins during a free weekend a few years ago and it automatically set its own graphics settings and dumped you into the game without being able to access the menu so it looked like my screen was covered in patrolium jelly half the time. About an hour into the game when I could finally access the game menu I learned why. It set all settings to their absolute highest but resolution scaling was enabled so it was trying to render graphics my PC couldn't handle then internally reducing the resolution down to 360p or so. Once I dialed in settings that my computer could actually handle without resolution scaling it looked a million times better
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God I can't stand it. It's one of those things like "Why do I need that, my eyes can already do that"
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To hide poor frame rate, that's why. Motion blur was popularized on consoles by AAA studios that wanted everything to look really pretty, but couldn't sustain a stable frame rate during rapid motion.
If you have the FPS to afford it, turn that shit off.
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Escort missions. Specifically when the person you are escorting is as sharp as a bag of hammers.
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even worse when its part of a setup where you are escorting but you have team members with missions that they can't do and you have to do them in a ship that is slow and you have to fly long distances to do what they were supposed to do but get back to defend your escort. Yes im talking about y-wing missions in the x-wing game.
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Microtransactions - the answer always has been and always will be microtransactions.
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Truly.
For multiplayer games, I would rather subscribe to updates than have mtxs in any capacity.
Of course they never offer this though because the mtxs combined with dark patterns work better.
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Pay $1 to view this comment.
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Unskippable intro levels that teach the control mechanics.
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Ancient history now but Black&White 1. "Now you know how to rotate the camera to the left. Next let's see if you can rotate it to the right!"
In the game's defence it was still early in the 3D era and there probably was a number of players who had never navigated a free camera in that environment before. Still rage inducing though.
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Unless they’re really well integrated. The first 40-60% of Portal is a tutorial. You just don’t notice because it’s just the game.
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I love how for a chunk of Portal 2 you're playing through the exact same chambers from Portal 1
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Pay to win.
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Permanently loosing a treasure that you can only get once because your pocket is full.
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Or even worse, reading online that there's some super special item you could have gotten 20 hours into the game if only you didn't open that one regular chest in the starting area in the first 5 minutes of the game. I forgot which Final Fantasy did this? 9 maybe? Pissed me off to no end, i'm not playing through everything again for this… just seemed mean spirited.
More generally, when decisions early on influnce later stuff that you have no way of knowing about yet. I'm not going to play your game 50 times to see all options. So either i play with the wiki open to not miss anything, ruining the fun, or i realize later on that i could have gotten something but it's now forever locked because of earlier decisions, pissing me off.
Baldurs Gate 3 had a lot of that…
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Reload.
Lol
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The last time you svae was 20 minutes ago because the game has designed spots for saving
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I was more thinking of something like in zelda minish cap for example. The money pocket has a limited size, and if you collect more, you just loose it. There are also chests with money in the world that you can only open once. So you have to strategically evade chests with money, especially if the chest is easily reachable. And then there's also those damn shells.
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QTE, especially when they're randomly inserted into an otherwise action/skill based game.
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Or to force you to pay attention during what is essentially a cutscene
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Dying Light, I'm looking at you...
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Mmmhm
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Very few checkpoints or save options. I don’t have time to try to beat something if there is like 20 mins of playtime from the last checkpoint.
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And then you stumble into an hour long cinematic.
Fuck that, Kojima should have made movies instead of games.-
Removed by Moderator — Modlog
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Don’t play Hades then
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Where one enemy sees you and now all their friends somehow knows where you are
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I love how the one game where this would make sense, FEAR (where the enemy is a clone army controlled by a single psychic commander), is also famous for how well the AI communicates with each other. They shout out detailed tactical chatter and announce their current moves even though it's pointless due to them all sharing the same mind.
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And if they have some kind of shared vision because of technology or telepathy, then make it hurt them them when one goes down.
Or make it make sense, like they have to spend a turn to contact the others, or they shout to alert other NPCs, but that just means there know there's a threat in this general area, not "we now have magic GPS for the next five minutes, and then I guess it must have been the wind."
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Are there any good examples of AI in games that do the opposite of this? Off the top of my head, pretty much every game works like this, I imagine having every NPC having its own vision & memory would become very complex to manage.
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One of the Splinter Cells showed you a ghost of the last position you were seen. Enemies acted as if you were last seen there.
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Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is like this. Usually if someone spots you wanting to attack you, they'll yell or something similar to get others attention. But other times you'll have someone notice you, they'll walk over and alert their buddies first and then they all come after you
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I could understand it if the enemies communicate somehow, like relaying your location
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Stat/EXP loss on death.
Unskippable cut scenes, especially before a boss. I want to play on hard difficulty, which means I WILL die to bosses. Do not force me to watch that shit 5+ times or I'm out like trout.
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Something that hasn't been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay...
Case in point, unmodded Skyrim's legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation'd...)
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Or when you can't beat the lvl1 monster easily because the scaling is so aggressive you never get to feel more powerful. Ohh look I spent 6hours on a side quest to get the legendary Sword that can cut anything from dragon scale to ghosts - yet it can't get through thug#1's leather shield?
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The borderland series is the worst for this. Boss fights just mean you have to continuously shoot the enemy for 10-15 mins.
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Skyrim and Oblivion difficulty is very stupid. If you change difficulty after playing a character for 100hr it isn't so bad, but if you want to start out on the hardest difficulty, I'd say it's actually impossible to play unless you have some kind of cheese tactic. Shooting a barbarian for like 1/100th of their health bar? And they one-shot you? What the hell kind of design is this?
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Atomfall was so good for its difficulty settings menu. They gave you soo many options. You could really tweak out a lot of parts you didn't like in the game but make the difficulty whatever you wanted it to be.
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Agreed. Everyone should take notes on how jedi: fallen order did difficulty. Sure, it did a bit of simple stat adjusting, but it also did things like increasing enemy aggression
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The kill animations in Skyrim are the worst. Doesn't matter how well you've done in the fight or how many potions you have, if the enemy manages to get you to a certain level of health you're killed instantly with no way to stop it. It's insulting to be killed like that by a random bandit that was lucky enough to drop you low enough before you could heal.
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Removed by Moderator — Modlog
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For me it probably is. I do not like many of the live-service game mechanics (limited stamina, gambling, microtransactions) but at least I get why; the one I mentioned just feels lazy and would make otherwise good games feel unplayable
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Yes.
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- Games with designated save points only.
- Skill/Tech trees that really only have one viable path.
- Games that reward stealth until the boss battle.
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The worst game mechanic is artificial difficulty where enemies aren't challenging. Instead, they are just damage sponges.
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Probably encumberance, almost certainly the single most ignored rule in rpgs.
But honorable mention goes to old school AC/THAC0 - the mechanics were originally for modern-era battleship game where armor class referred to size. Using the smallness of boats to model the defensive power of better armor was never going to produce sensible results. THAC0 was always unweildy at the table, slowed play, and turned combat into a chorus of "uggghhhh does a 13 hit?" "Ugh.... no."
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Encumbrance makes a lot of sense in the context of old D&D, progression was tied to how much treasure you could get out of a dungeon. It also works well in survival-type games where resource management is a key mechanic. But like many facets of old D&D it is applied widely with no consideration.
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2E is still best. Fight me.
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Fight me
I would, but if we're using 2e it's gonna take hours.
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Both Control and the dogshit Avengers game had these upgrade systems where you were constantly bombarded with pickups that offered inane benefits like “2.5% increase to headshot damage for 3 seconds after taking damage while in midair” and you spent half the game managing your goddamn upgrades and the limited upgrade slots instead of having fun. It got to the point where I was relieved when I DIDN’T get any upgrades after a battle.
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Oh yeah, I really liked Control and recommended someone else play it. He didn't make it far and I asked why not and he said the upgrade system and the crafting... and I was like what crafting?
He said the way you turn figments or whatever into upgrades or whatever. And I was like "oh yeah, that rings a bell... I just didn't do any of that".
I don't always have this power, but in this case I was apparently able to ignore entire chunks of the game and enjoy what was left. So I have a weird skewed view of the game 😛
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Lucky bastard. I feel like by the end of the game, many hours in, I was doing like all of 15% more damage.
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In Control the only good ones are increasing damage, increasing magazine size, and lowering the cooldowns on your psychic powers. You're basicslly better off just using the throw power than using the service weapon, even on bosses.
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Yeah that’s pretty close to how I treated it, but I still had to wade through mountains of garbage to get to useful upgrades.
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I don't think that I can give the worst, but I can give some that I did not enjoy.
- Invisible teleporters. Some old RPGs --- like the D&D Gold Box games --- came without an auto-mapping feature. Part of the game was, as one played along, manually creating a map on graph paper. This in-and-of-itself was somewhat time-consuming, and if one made a mistake or got turned around, it could be hard to fix one's map. A particularly obnoxious feature to complicate this was that sometimes, there'd be unmarked teleporters to move you to another place on the map without notice, and you had to figure out that this had happened. Very annoying. I didn't like this mechanic.
- Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature. Some strategy games do this. The idea here is to force you to think in real time, and not permit you to just pause and think about things. Problem is, even if one agrees with this, in the real world, sometimes you need to answer the door or use the toilet. Not a good idea.
- In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one's precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There's some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don't think that it's necessary --- a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don't really like situations where it's just added for the sake of being there.
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Real-time games with an intentional omission of a pause feature.
Agreed. I can understand in MMOs, but if I'm the only one playing, the game should stop when I say stop.
At least make it an option in the accessibility settings if it's not "the developers' intended experience".
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It took me forever to get used to it in sekiro.
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I've got kids, if I'm playing while they're up I have to be able to drop everything on a dime to go stop them from managing to kill themselves because that happens about 3x an evening
There's several games I'd like to play but simply don't because I cannot pause. Like I get it, single player is just booting up the multiplayer server without networking so only you can join, but also it's only a single player so they should be able to pause the engine whenever they want to
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- In general, positive-feedback loops that increase the difficulty for the player. An example would be shmups where being hit causes not just the loss of a life, but the loss of a level of one's precious weapon power, or something like that. That means that when one is doing poorly, the difficulty also ramps up. There's some degree of this in many games insofar as it might be harder to play when one is weaker, but in the shmup case, I really don't think that it's necessary --- a game would be perfectly playable without that element. I don't really like situations where it's just added for the sake of being there.
I hate this mechanic so much. If a player couldn't win with the powerup, all taking it away does is consign them to a slow death spiral. This made sense when shmups were quarter-munching arcade machines, but this "feature" remained a staple of the genre even after it moved to home consoles.
And for a non-shmup example, Super Star Wars was another major offender. The game was incredibly hard even with a maxed out weapon. Dying reverted you to the basic blaster, cutting your damage output to a fraction of what it was and making it nearly impossible to get past the tougher boss fights if you didn't win on the first try. It's often considered one of the hardest games of all time, and I'm willing to bet this mechanic is the main reason why.
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Bard's Tale had a street you could not completely walk down. At one point there's a teleporter that just sends you 3 squares back.
Sinister St.
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Timer that can be skipped with paid currency.
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I too was about to day Dungeon Keeper for mobile. What a wasted game.
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KeeperFX is on gog. Grab that instead
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You can just say "mobile".
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2 sets of teeth, the first only lasting 1/9 of your life and the second being 8/9. 2/9, 7/9 would be much better or just 2/9, 4/9, 6/9.
Oh, hair falling out and all your joints hurting for 5/9 of your life kinda blows as well.
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Loot boxes
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For me: weapon durability.
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I dunno, my mind changed a bit on this once I played BotW. As long as weapons are significantly different enough and there's always ways to be effective with each, and you get a non-stop slew of them to rotate through, it's fun.
If you lose any of the above conditions though and you're just constantly trying to repair your weapon set, needing to pack stupid numbers of repair kits or stop at the corner store in town or whatever to repair your only set, that's a no from me dawg.
But it can be fun. When I first played BotW I was really frustrated about durability until I complained about it to my friend and he was like "dude who cares, just pick up one of the 20 weapons laying on the ground and keep moving" I realized that I no longer need to hoard all the best weapons and I could just send it, and the game got way more fun.
That being said, most games do it poorly and 90% of the time I agree with you. Looking at YOU dead Island 2
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I was thinking specifically of Breath of the Wild.
For me, Zelda has always been about scratching my completionist itch.
Making all the weapons temporary means I never get to feel the power of a completed inventory. Instead I'm just trading off weapons that I don't like for more weapons that I don't like. And if I do like one, it breaks anyway.
I didn't even bother with Tears of the Kingdom for that reason. It's a feel-bad mechanic, and I'd rather not do it.
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I generally hate it, too, but thought it felt pretty fitting and okay in RDR2.
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Far Cry 2 as well. Low durability didn't break your weapon, it just increased the chance of a misfire or jam and made combat more chaotic. And if it really bothered you, you could always buy a simple AK (which was practically indestructible when upgraded).
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Anything that is 100% chance and just wasting time, with no meaningful way for the player to influence the odds. For example, how fishing is implemented in some MMOs like ESO: you can eat a buff food and use the correct bait for the water, but beyond that you're just waiting in agony until the random timer dings. Then you do that 12 times before moving to the next hole, etc. "Waiting" isn't an enjoyable mechanic.
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Why is fishing always a rod too? Let me setup a few 200m trotlines!
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If I can't dredge the sea floor and destroy the ecosystem don't even talk to me about a game
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Good point! I suggest fishing spears if only to grief the players who are begging for spears as a melee weapon in ESO.
But more seriously: a spear mechanic at least would have an element of skill to aim at the fish and account for refraction - or something. Not just pure chance.
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Fishing is one of those things were you should not really need to do it and by that mean it should not provide something useful you can't get elsewhere. Have fisherman selling fish hey caught and have other things dropping whatever else comes from it.
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I don't mind that fishing exists and I understand many people enjoy it as a kind of zen. I personally would enjoy it more if it were more engaging.
You're right, I could just choose to ignore it if it has nothing of value to me.
However, at least in ESO, tons of achievements and rewards are locked behind fishing activities. I could ignore their as well, but I would prefer if I could enjoy a more engaging fishing mini game (like their scrying is tedious but at least you're actively doing something).
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Relationship mechanics. If I give someone a pumpkin twice a week, they’re just going to be confused and pissed.
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When you can't dodge because you're charging an attack/doing a combo/whatever. If I'm attacking one enemy, and I see another one about to attack me from behind, I want to be able to get out of the way, not be stuck in an attack animation until I get hit
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QTE, including those i have to align those bar that goes left and right, or those tap a button quickly, in any game that isn't point and click adventure game. It's not fun in God of War, and it's not fun in Dying Light.
Also extreme hand-holding tutorial that force you to click button or do certain action else your progression is refused. This happened a lot in mobile game, which i basically refuse to play.
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Not really a game mechanic, but as an achievement hunter I freakin' HATE speedrun-achievements. The longer the game, the worse it is
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Yeah, silksong is impossible to 100% achievement unless you're the most hardcore achievement hunter.
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How about an achievement per difficulty and doing the harder ones don't unlock the easier ones
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Hey hey, me too. I mostly just don't want too many "redo this whole game again" stuff, unless there's a reason (split path, etc). A stress filled second run is not a good reason.
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I blame resident evil for this
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Grinding.
When the game progresses naturally, and as you move through the game, you always find yourself in the right spot to overcome the next obstacle, that's great. But the second I have to stop progressing through the game and go spend 6 hours killing goblins, I'm done.
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Escort missions
The only good escort missions are the ones where you aren't limited at all by the NPC you need to escort, which no longer makes it an escort mission.
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Upgrades that cannot be changed. Don't force me to replay the entire game just to see what a different upgrade does. I'm my opinion, all games should let you rebuild your character pretty much whenever. I think BG3 did a good job of it with Withers. The price is low enough to not feel like a burden but high enough to not encourage you to cheese it. The only small downside of it is that Withers is technically an optional character you could miss. I think mechanics like this should just be baked in.
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Agreed! It's so frustrating when I screw up a build, or realize I don't enjoy the build I made after investing too many hours.
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Withers isn't optional, if you don't go to his crypt he still eventually shows up in your camp. His introduction is a bit truncated and confusing if I remember correctly, but I'm pretty sure you cannot get to the Mountain Pass or Shadow-cursed Lands without withers showing up first.
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Ah, nice. That makes me feel better. Since some party members are sort of missable I assume.ed he was too.
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Respeccing. It shouldn't be infinitely free, but I like games that allow you to pay (usually increasing amounts) to respec.
Related to this, in older games without this it was common practice to save up your skillpoints and just sit on them until you'd gotten a little further into the game and hopefully had a better idea how to spend them. What was massively frustrating in older games were when leveling up forced you to immediately spend the points instead of sitting on them.
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Increasing costs or a limited amount of them are dumb in my opinion. Especially when so many games explain the specifics of their mechanics so poorly and at times downright incorrectly.
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Stealth challenges on games that don't have stealth as a regular mechanic
Anything that makes you follow an npc that doesn't match speed with the fucking player
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Anything that makes you follow an npc that doesn't match speed with the fucking player
Flashback of following Delphine to Kynesgrove to kill Mirmulnir
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Flashback of following Delphine to Kynesgrove to kill
MirmulnirSahloknir
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I usually end up running zigzags, just to keep myself entertained while the NPC slowly plods along. But yeah, rubber banding (NPC gets slower as they get farther away, then speeds up as you get closer) should be in every game dev’s arsenal.
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Ah, Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2, where you, Dracula, start off wimpy and weak, are forced to do shitty stealth. Near the end of the game, fully powered up, you still cannot take those forced stealth enemies head on
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All the ones gacha games employ: daily stamina, grind to get some currency, power creep the characters, create content that can only be cleared with premium characters etc.
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A lot of pokemon adjacent games are like that, usual involves mtx
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They do make it obvious the game should be uninstalled though
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The outright scams and marketting dark patterns.
Outside of this, I hate when you have levelled up a character immensely to the point where an errant sneeze could wipe out half a city, and then you flick a boss to defeat their lineage then lose in the cutscene.
I know the reasons why this is done, but I would vastly prefer shorter but more fleshed out game experiences.
A shorter story that is actually repayable naturally where you can do so many things and there are not cutscene losses.
Speaking of which, things like ::: spoiler spoiler The Secret Ending ::: in Cyberpunk could be so much better if they just didn't fucking exist.
I don't want to have to read some guide to know that a a piece of content I really value will exist.
Its not fun to me to have notable portions of a game cut out such that you have to be a wiki reader.
These combined would make a game with a more stress free experience where you can truly just experience the world and not be too fussed about if you stuffed up a certain ending tree etc.
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Games with inventories where they treat a single gem or a flower petal as occupying the same space in your rucksack as a pair of boots.
Guys, we go back to Ultima 7 with the key ring, the problem was solved along fucking time ago. Stop being lazy and have gem sacks, crafting bags, keyrings, etc for small items.
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Anything pay to play ruins it for me.
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Limited inventory space in an otherwise unrealistic RPG.
You're telling me I can carry six two-handed weapons and 500lbs of gold, but seven is just too much?! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Specifically, this especially sucks when the inventory is a grid, like in the Diablo series, or Grim Dawn, or WoW, FFXIV or... many other MMOs.
especially when you can spend real money to alleviate the artificial limitation they fucking designed in to the game.
It's so unnecessary and these days absolutely makes me instantly not care to continue playing. FUCK artificial limitations that don't have clear, valid reasons.
I'm here to play a game, not Inventory Management Simulator 33.45
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Exponentially growing requirements that out pace rewards. I don't want to spend 10 hours grinding just to level up.
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multiplayer shooters with unlockable weapons/classes
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Time gates. Gacha games are rife with them...
Want a piece of equipment for your character? Well spend daily currency to get one that regenerates over a day. Oops rng God hates you and you got +Def for a character that wants +Atk, better luck tomorrow/next week... Oops it's still not your week +Hp this time.
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Ah another one - Forced stealth sections where you can't be detected at all. Especially in a game where stealth is optional or not even a thing you can really do normally.
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The forced stealth level early on is what keeps me from replaying Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
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Probably the Enemy Boxer from Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. Canonically he is a mechanic but they don’t even give him the wrench ability which isn’t even that special of an ability, and then he dies like a wimp with his plastic still-alive head getting chopped off by the plane that he’s supposed to be repairing. An idiot who would punch an anvil three times in a row deserves that sort of graceless demise.
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I see what you did there
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Grinding and no rewards. Feeling underpowered and dying all the time, unable to progress with loot alone.
Looking at you, Path of Exile.
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Sports games pretty much stopped progressing entirely when the "ultimate team" cancer spread.
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INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE
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Lootboxes
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Time limits / countdowns.
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Removed by Moderator — Modlog
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ManaMana Banana 5?
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ManaMana Banana Nana 5 actually, use it's full name
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Quick time events.
Carry weight.
Hiding content in New Game Plus. Making me play a game twice just to artificially ass replay "value."
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Carry slot limits annoy me more.
Weight makes sense from a story perspective. Even a top-spec fighter can't carry four zweihanders and 500 food rations.
But even the 1-STR mage who might have a legitimate carry weight limit of 2kg, should not be told "you can only carry 3 different types of 10-gram herb." Especially if he's allowed to carry 200 units of any one of the types. Give me anything resembling a viable story-based reason for that.
But selling a solution to that is a very popular monetization paradigm for MMOs, so it stays.
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If we leave realism aside for a moment, though, the difference is that:
- a carry slot limit restricts how many distinct kinds of items you can have, whereas
- a carry weight limit moreso forces you to leave behind duplicates of items or to e.g. make a choice between heavy armor vs. having auxiliary items.
It depends on the game what's more fitting for the overall design, but yeah, ultimately you want to prevent the player from optimizing the fun out of the game.
Having very heavy armor or dozens of healing potions can be boring, since there's no risk anymore. But having one of each different kind of item can also kill the fun, because having the perfect solution for every situation is just as boring.
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I'd argue that rather than carry weight, the real culprit is shops where you can sell stuff. If you knew right away that junk is not worth picking up, because you can't sell it, then you wouldn't pick it up. And then the carry weight limit can do what it was designed for, which is to make you strategize what equipment to bring along.
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Seriously, I will rate a game poorly on account of that replay plus bs.
It should only be there so you can experience being fully levelled out for the earlier missions.
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Carry weight is gameplay balancing. Without it on those games you'd just hoard a million healing items or something.
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All the junk in fallout? I know it's worthless, but my compulsion is to loot everything.
I'm not opposed to those that want that mechanic, but it would be nice for there to simply be a toggle to disable it.
I can't stand going into a dungeon and on the third chest having to decide what to throw away this time.
I'm ALWAYS going to have a max inventory, it's stupid not to play a game without it. If I can carry 10 healing items, I will just in case. But it also means at every single drop, I have to go into my inventory and decide what to toss. Or if to toss. It's takes up time when want to do the fun things in the game. And it makes me have to constantly make decisions and think if this item is better than one I have, and if so what do I get rid of. Do I get rid of healing potions or mana potions? When is the next time I can sell this? How much is this worth?
I play games to play games. Not to micromanage inventory.
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Okay, but make crafting mats 0 at least or have a second "hoard" inventory that doesn't count but is also inaccessible in combat or something. Just give us a way to clean out a dungeon without having to do a bunch of time wasting bullshit.
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Just because a bad mechanic has a purpose doesn't mean it's not bad.
I hate being forced to think about that shit.
I love a partial solution in Cyberpunk where healing items simply have a cool down.
Odenst make lore sense really, but you can flavour text that up.
Weightlimits mostly serve to add annoying inventory management to a game that is supposed to be an escape.
They should design their games better to not need the player to do that or horde things.
Its part of why I hate how "loot" is typically done.
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Better save this potion for later, I might need it.
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Carry weight.
Oooh, you would not like Fallout 76.
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I don't think anyone likes Fallout 76
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I played until they patches the bug where if you equipped/unequipped gear that affected carry weight fast enough it would't remove the effect every time and you could max it out.
Also, I hated that your stash was also limited by carry weight.
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Unchangeable difficulty settings. Worse, games that offer you to lower it and don't warn you that they're going to lock it at the lower setting. Resident Evil Village did that to me. Last time I posted about this someone said it warms you, so I guess they changed it.
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The skulls in MGSV.
"Let's put almost unkillable, magic zombies that chase you into this stealth game. Also, make them unavoidable"
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"And we'll announce their presence in the pre-mission credits so you spend the entire mission waiting for the moment things suddenly start to suck."
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Practice your CQC and the Skull encounters quickly become a joke. The only ones you need to worry about are the snipers, and that’s basically just like when you fought Quiet.
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I never found them to be a joke, even with CQC, but I agree that is the best way to handle them.
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I'll mention God of War and its final battle. You spend the entire game building skill with one set of weapons, then the end of the game pushes a brand new set of moves on you. I never did finish the game because of that BS.
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Nightreign has essentially that with one of the bosses you can fight and it's genuinely the worst boss in the game, imo. You spend 30-45 minutes building up a kit with your teammates only to be given a sword which is literally mandatory to damage the boss in phase 2. And even then basically all you do with it is charge up then fire off projectiles while the boss flies around in the sky. Easily the least interesting boss fight in the game.
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Deliberately ableist bullshit. Like no pause or an over reliance on quick time events.
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Doom3 flashlight. It’s Doom. Not fucking 5 Nights at Freddy’s.
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when !flashlight@lemmy.world can give you dozens of illumination options more capable than science fiction has
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Taking control away from the player for stupid bullshit.
Dragon's Dogma 2 had this to the most extreme level I had ever seen. Random NPCs can initiate dialogue without you hitting a prompt (and they can appear anywhere, even in the middle of a cave full of monsters). Your companions will sometimes high five you, and it just forces you into an animation that it didn't prompt you for. There is an actual boss fight in the game that is literally a cutscene of someone else fighting it.
Dragon's Dogma? More like Dragon's Dogshit. 😬
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Courier: Hey, i got a message for you. Let see...
Giant closing in before sending you to meet Talos
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That example also made me think of Elder Scrolls games, but I was thinking about how in the case of guards running up to detain you, forcing you into dialogue is legitimate. But yeah, the Skyrim couriers, not so much!
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At least dialogue pauses the game in Skyrim. DD2, it doesn't so now that gryphon you were running away from has a free shot at your ass 😩
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There is an actual boss fight in the game that is literally a cutscene of someone else fighting it.
That reminds me of Fable 2, where the worst character in the entire series (who you're forced to ally with) will kill-steal the final boss if you don't shoot them during their speech.
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I would love an online/offline mmo use a modified version of the companion system were your character could be marked for people to use as a companion and also integrate in the gambit system from final fantasy so you can config how your character behaves maybe even with quips.
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Underwater swimming on a game that wasn't built around it. Every single time it's a frustrating battle with poor camera angles and imprecise controls.
Oh I'm above the thing I need to collect but slightly out of grabbing range, all I need to do is go straight down... And now I'm 20ft away.
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Often it's climbing.
I'm looking at you, breath of the wild.
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Speaking of botw, lots to explore and find... And none of it is worthwhile or actually affect the gameplay in any real way.
Especially when it's the excuse for the massive world that takes forever to traverse.
And now let's convince the entire industry that this blight is a good idea and shoehorn it in to everything
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Completing botw became more of a chore than anything else. I couldn't get all the way through tears of the kingdom. The chores in that one just compounded. I managed to somehow light up the entire underworld and yet my gear was too fucking terrible to face the end bosses.
Botw was very cool at times, but it had a few things that made it utterly frustrating to play. The weapons breaking and having to watch Link go "uhh eeefff eeeff ooof" on the side of a cliff for hours was just painful and purposeless.
To your point, it seems like no game can manage to have an expansive, explorable world that's actually rewarding to explore. Maybe there is an exception out there but I haven't encountered it.
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I feel like The Witcher 2 had a good balance. You're instanced in a smallish but very meaningfully designed map that's big enough to feel like you're actually exploring a bit, but small enough to actually be hand-designed and decorated and feel like it too
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If only it was climbing. BOTW was more like "oh there was light rain recently so fuck you, no access up here."
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The indie game Sable had brilliant climbing mechanics. You have limited climbing like in most games, but you literally don't need the extended climbing range for almost the entirety of the main game except for like one or two not-required missions, you only really need it to collect all of the collectables that extend your climbing range. You know how I know? I didn't find the way to extend climbing range until like the very end of the game. Somehow completely skipped over it!
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I 100%d sable and only found it mildly frustrating in certain parts. Pretty good game overall.
I wish there were more games like it where you could just enjoy the world instead of it being all about some missions.
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Been playing Dark Deity (a Fire Emblem clone) lately and instead of permadeath, it reduces a random stat by 10% permanently. Can't say I'm a fan. Just have a permadeath mode and a regular mode.
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Wow that's on my backlog list but seriously, it forces a reload either way, at least make it a splashy permadeath.
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Agreed. I do like the game a lot, though. It just has this one weird decision.
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Alien pods getting a free move as soon as you uncover them
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What is this, some X-COM game?
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Yep!
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Missable or multiplayer-only achievements. Or the ones that force you to replay the game.
Ghost of Yōtei is doing it well. Everything is available at all times after the main story is completed in a single game. I could think of a few possible achievements they could have created that would be missable but I'm glad they didn't.
GTA5 has a lot of multiplayer achievements I could never get because I hate GTA Online.
Talos Principle 2 has at least two achievement that each needs a replay to the end and you have to follow a specific path of talking to characters that you don't know upfront if you're not looking online for it. So if you're trying this without a guide you might end up replaying it more than twice. That's shitty.
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Escort missions
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Achievements.
I want to enjoy the game, not artificial milestones for bragging rights.
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Games that have long scripted sections you can't skip and sometimes even save. Next level, you'll have to move around and answer questions so can't even go take a shit.
Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk both had sections like that. Loved the games, hated that bullshit.
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Which section in cyberpunk are you referring to? I was 100% on board with what you were saying and then that stumped me.
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The whole section between the takemura junkyard cutscene and waking up in your appartment doesn't allow saving, however iirc when the game came out it was the ENTIRE heist sequence once you got to yorinobus room.
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All I can think of is maybe at the start of Phantom Liberty? On first arrival at Dogtown you were locked in to a string of missions for a while but I don't remember if you couldn't pause or save because I did all of that part in one go anyway.
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I could be wrong it's been years since I played. Just have a memory of wanting to take a break and not being able to.
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Not the worst, but I'm annoyed by invisible walls. Just give me a reason why I can't be there.
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A multiplayer game that pits you against lousy AI bots with human looking names for your first "games' so you feel like you know how to play and makes the game seem fair and fun.
Then after you're comfortable, you get pitted against a lobby of 12-year-olds who haven't seen daylight since birth who annihilate you and curse you out on coms.
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QTE
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Removed by Moderator — Modlog
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My buddy calls Metroidvania games “corner scratchers” because so many devs have habits of hiding the best loot behind breakable walls that look exactly the same as regular walls.
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The original Metroid has mandatory areas that are hidden behind breakable walls, including one that drops you through a fake lava floor.
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press ▲ to jump. shit button. it's x.
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Holding a button to do anything/everything. I can see the logic of where it may be useful, but it doesn't need to be used for everything. So damn annoying.
*Oh, and similarly, forcing excessive submenus to do basic things, like continue a save from the main menu. That should be one, maybe two button presses, not 4+ along with a confirmation. I'll never understand games with stuff like that.
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No Man's Sky is a repeat offender for both of those things. How they've released constant major updates for a decade but never taken the time to fix their terrible user interface is one of life's great mysteries.
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Souls. The clumsy roll and artificial difficulty spikes and losing all your shit because you didn’t do it all “just right” for the entire encounter.
Ugh.
EDIT: Honorable mention . . . Timers. I’m looking at you, current Bungie.
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Progression systems that draw attention away from the core gameplay loop
Examples are season passes, archivements, minigames that took longer too complete then the main game
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Invite your friends for "bonus" resources, or even worse, to unlock progression.
If you want to incentivize me to growthhack your product, let's talk dollars, not Mystic Sunshine Gems.
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Poorly done procedural generation where it's a waste of time to explore. The first Remnant was pretty bad about this, with small setpieces scattered throughout the levels that looked interesting but usually only contained basic enemies and one or two empty pots. Filling out the map was a chore that was almost never worth the effort - almost never because sometimes there was a unique drop hidden in a level just to screw over anyone who got sick of fighting through hundreds of empty buildings and decided to stick to the main path.
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Starfield did more of this. What a dud that was!
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Bethesda's random leveled loot is another contender for worst mechanic. It was always fun picking the lock on a master-level chest deep in a dungeon only to find thirteen coins and a wooden spoon inside.
"Some may call this junk. Me, I call it treasure." could be a line from their design document.
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Health as a resource
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For board games, not having a firm way to end the game. A lot of Steve Jackson games have this problem where the mechanics of the game mean a lot of people will prevent people from winning the game , which usually lengthens the game as people have more power to keep others from winning than winning themselves.
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MTX for customisation
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One of the worst game mechanics ever found in a game was where the enemy got harder as you gained levels. The same enemy. It basically defeated the value of having more levels. I think it was Oblivion
Skyrimwhere I found this, particularly annoying. -
No natural health/mana regeneration. I hate games where you need potions to survive or are limited in your spell usage just because you do not enough mana which was finished earlier.
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Hold w to crawl forward
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Health scaling as you level. Just ducking lazy.
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Microtransactions
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Survival crafting. I spend my real life days trying to keep up on sheltering and feeding myself. I don’t want to “relax” by punching trees to make a fire to cook a bird I punched to death.
The pervasiveness of this in every game has limited the content I engage with the last 10 or so years. Everyone started chasing that Minecraft money and now it’s Ubi-fied into just about every mainstream title.
I don’t want to forge new weapons. I want to find them in a chest or earn them by killing a boss. I have bounced off of so many games the moment they ask me to learn a system of crafting. Keep that in it’s own genre and stop padding games out with repetitive busy work.
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Since all the obvious answers have been covered, I'm gonna dig deep on a genre nobody but me even plays anymore anyway.
Character-based asymmetry in versus puzzle games. It's never been remotely balanced, and I don't believe it ever could be.
Suppose I put you in charge of developing a balance patch for Puyo Puyo Fever, Puzzle Bobble 3, Magical Drop, Meteos, etc, you could just name any other puzzle game that has this. What changes would you make? What changes could you even try to make?
If you look at something like a fighting game, characters have large movesets, and every move has a bunch of variables attached: startup, active, recovery, hitstun, damage, meter gain. Which means there's a lot of surface area for developers to adjust and fine-tune until the cast hopefully feels balanced enough. Even if they don't get it right on the first try, they can gather data from players and use that information to figure out what needs to be patched.
Puzzle games have little to no room to even try to do this. So when you try to give character choice a mechanical effect on gameplay, but they only do one thing like a dropset or garbage pattern, there are almost no meaningful buffs or nerfs that can be handed out when it turns out that Void Hole is kinda good and Skeleton T kinda isn't.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix famously tried, and, well, an attempt was made but it ultimately couldn't do all that much. The tiers got shuffled around slightly, but it's still Ken Fighter.
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Fishing
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Not really the worst, but my hot take of something I don't like: puzzles rather than problems. By that I mean puzzles have one correct solution and everything else is wrong and doesn't work, while with a problem you're given some tools and an obstacle and just let loose. It's so much more satisfying to find your own solution that it is to reach the end and realize you were being sneakily handheld through it to make sure you found the only possible way through. I've done a few good problems where I reach the end, then immediately reload the save from before and try some different routes just to see if it works.
Puzzles do have their place though, especially in tutorials.
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I'm with you except the last sentence.
Tuts should just be direct and move out of your way.
Back onto your main point, one of the things I really like Cyberpunk for was the ability to do so many missions in so many different ways.
Like for the same mission you might just drive by as a netrunner, hack the thing, and keep driving like nothing happened. Or as a Sandevestan user you might slow down time, run past everyone, get thing and leave. Or as a ... You get the point.
There are, for any given mission usually like 5 obvious ways you can think of to get it done and the game won't slap you for it.
On the other hand, the breach protocol in the game sucks so much. They should just remove it.
By the time you're done the game, you'll have played that boring, unfun, tedious, not even challenging bs for collectively like an hour.
On my second play through its the first thing I modded out.
Fuck things in games that purely waste your time.
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"Here's a rare weapon dropped by this boss! But wait, you need to be at least level 30 to use it, and you're still on level 2."
I went out of my way to repeatedly grind and kill this late game boss during early game, just give me my reward for not following the stupid linear progression
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Weapon durability
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I kinda disagree. Sure, if it's just thrown on top with no real thought to it, it's bad. But it's possible to build around durability to make it a core part of the game. Think Zelda BOTW and TOTK. Weapon durability is a central part of the combat gameplay loop in those games. There's plenty of weapons lying around, so you never really run out, and there are more details that mean you can actually use the system to your advantage (like how you deal massive damage on the breaking hit).
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I literally quit playing botw and totk because of weapon durability. It adds nothing to the game except to make it possible I'm in an unwinnable boss fight because I forgot to bring more than five weapons. If I could use weapons for 5x as long it wouldn't have made me quit; I'd just not like that part of the game. But some weapons lasting only 3-5 hits is fucking ridiculous.
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Funny because that's exactly the games I'm thinking of.
Granted I was trying to play the game on hard mode so that didn't help, but the system felt awful to me. There's a band of goblins, let me see if I have any weapons bad enough to be worth spending on them.
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Yes. Gtfo here with that. Infuriating.
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Europa Universalis 4 forced historical events while also advertising it as a sandbox. For example: no matter how stable you are as netherlands. As soon as you end your golden age your country will go into a civil war that if you have collonies you can barely get out of. Because "well it was in history like that"
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In CK3 you can change some forced historical events, can you not in EU4?
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Nope! :)
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Fragile world-spanning deliveries.
Silksong has me screaming over them, 10 - 20 minutes of walking and one too many smacks at the end ruins it. And then there's the one that's also timed!
But to be fair, most of Silksong gets me yelling at the TV on the regular! I love it and hate it!
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Enchant weapons/armor to +x%. It usually companies Pay2Win items that you can use to have a 100% chance of upgrading, or at least not breaking your armor.
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When someone dies in Mario multiplayer there's a short pause in the gameplay. It really fucks up everyone else's timing.
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Button-mashing events. (The Rapid-fire kind)
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Unskippable cutscenes. Escort quests where I have to walk slowly.
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Fuck you gears of war for creating the trope of walking while dialogue is playing so you don't advance too fast. Just give me the fucking cutscene, you're not fooling anyone
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Archers interrupting your attacks. Fucking archers.
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I was recently reading The Frugal Wizards Handbook for Surviving Medieval England and one of the characters who ultimately gets shot by an archer talks at length about how much he dislikes archers and how unfair they are
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Gambling.
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There is only one thing worse than gambling.
A child.
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Maybe not the worst, but I've been playing old RPGs and I really hate mandatory loss fights in late game or NG+. Radiata Stories was a fantastic game but I was bonkers powerful on my second playthrough yet somehow lost a fight to a humongous chud asshole for plot reasons. Rare misstep in that games story, honestly.
Best example of subversion of that trope, though,b was in Dragon Quest 11. If you know, you know, but I won't spoil that, lol.
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Crafting. And jumping games.
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Puzzles that are entirely music based with no visual cues.
They're bad enough for me as just a guy with no rhythm or note recognition, but also just fuck deaf people I guess?
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How about the release broken game then finish the game way after release… if you’re lucky mechanic?
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Gamers and investors both incentivize this unfortunately and apparently regulators are cool with straight up fraud too.
Ill never forgive no man's sky, no matter how much they fixed it after.
They were openly fraudulent and got away with it.
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Ante, Magic the Gathering
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Any game that forces snap to center cameras. No one should ever have to fight against the controls in a game.
(Looking at you No Man’s Sky)
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I've got a time-traveling kick in the nuts prepared for whoever invented wall-humping for unmarked secrets. I first remember this from Wolfenstein 3D but I'm not sure if it existed before then.
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This is more game specific than anything else, but the slingshot rock from Dungeon Clawler. Temporarily destroys an item, uses the first item item it hits once, and then the next twice before disappearing. Doesn't bounce in a way I like.
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You know when you are in the middle of a game's story and then you get caught or something wjd the enemy takes all your gear and you have to find your gear or fight to get it back? No screw that. So annoying.
And I'm the kind of player that does all sise quests before doing the main story so I can be OP and plow through the story. Just let me do that and don't take what I worked hard to get.
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I have a dislike for cutscenes. Often during gameplay, suddenly you lost control, often behavior is inconsistent, and you have to wait to be able to continue to play.
The half-life series shows how it can be done without. Story without losing control. Characters do their scripted behavior within the context of the world.
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Escort Missions. Especially when pathfinding AI was terrible.
Quick Time Events in a game that it isn't the focus. Halo 4 had exactly two quick time events. One in the first level and one in the last level.
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- Auto you lose cutscenees
- Hidden story trees or finicky story trees so you have to meticulously follow guides lest you get a bad end or miss a secret ending
- Weapons that break. No. Never. Stop doing it.
- Shotguns that only are effective up to 10 ft What game actually has shotguns act like real shotguns???
- Loading screen ass tunnels or hallways or elevators. We live in 2025. Evryone has Ssds and there are many ways to load as a player advances. Stop doing this 1990s shit.
- Timers. Just never find them fun
- Forced heavy backtracking. I'm not having fun, you're just wasting my time. Fuck you.
- Unrelated puzzle mini games Please stop adding worthless busy work into games. One of the first mods I added to Cyberpunk was just to remove the stupid breach protocol. It's not that its hard, it's not. It's just time wasting and annoying. Dispatch is another game with these for no reason. Fallout, Bioshock, fucking so many games have this shit. Either I have the level to pick the fucking lock or I don't. I don't want to play some half assed unrealistic lockpicking sim for the equivalent of an hour by the time the game is done. It's like making you have to take each step for your character or breathe. Not the point.
- Obviously all mtxs, goes without saying and marketting dark patterns like everything here.
- Nerfing """OP""" things in single player power fantasy games. Are you high? That's the fucking point!
- Chance based loot. Just no. I don't want to reload a dozen times to get the thing I want. It arguably exists in the world and I should just be able to go find it.
- Loot. Stop spreading this shit around making me have to waste time everywhere I go in order to be remotely optimally equipped. Just say no to loot. Healing should be on a cool down and have upgrades availible like in cyberpunk, Ammunition should be on enemies, cooldown or purchased Weapons if loot able should be placed identically with no luck elements, or in exactly the stores they should be in.
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The shotgun one makes sense because if they were real world accurate it would be the only useful gun in most games.
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Yup, shotguns would literally be the only weapon anyone used. In World War 2, Germany tried to sue America for war crimes, because American trench guns were too effective. Germany was getting devastated in the trenches, purely because a few dudes with shotguns could mow down an entire platoon once they made it into the enemy trenches.
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It doesn't "make sense" as in a general rule, it "makes sense" as in most games are designed in such a fashion where this is the case.
It think that is completely ok though. There are many shot guns around with all sorts of variety, and its far too rare that a game lets them be what they would be.
It would be great to show that yea, for a normal person, a shotgun is indeed the ultimate anti infantry weapon.
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QTEs
Fucking RE4 Original
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Have you heard about Fatal, pretty sure that it's hard to beat game mechanics to evaluate physical injury due to an inter species rape
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I feel like most game mechanics are good when implemented well and bad when implemented poorly. unless you count stuff like p2w/gatcha/gambling
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Waiting.
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Zelda boss fights
Inventory management
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Roll and move. Skip your turn.
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I thought about my answer, since many mechanics I don't like can have good implementations, or at the very least are a sort of lesser of two evils kind of thing.
What I can't stand are tactical or RPG games with realtime or turn based combat option toggles. I play many games with one or the other and enjoy them, but when I play a game with both that can be toggled in options I always feel like neither setting feels perfectly right. The balance is always off no matter what. Understandable with game devs having to double the amount of work for creating combat and tuning items and it ends up feeling a little soggy every time.
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Ps1 Spider-Man having 3 bosses in a row at the end of the game.
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Miss a turn.
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Random chance to miss attack to high ground. Blink dagger reduced range if you click past the distance radius of the item.
I'm looking at you, Dota2.
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I don't really know the name of the game mechanics, but when I was a kid I bought, with my saves, Halo Wars for Xbox 360, the worst investment I have done after ChainLink cryto purchase, well as a newbie I listened to my friend how Halo was the best game they have ever played!!!, as the you all may guess, the were talking about Halo 4.
Since then I am GOW fan. Halo wars had a poor mechanics for me 12 years ago, maybe today could be a game I would like.
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Roguelike. Especially in games that are supposed to have a narrative.
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Math
If I wanted to do math, I'd play D&D.
The computer's job is to do math, not mine as a player. Any game that exposes it's math to the extent that a player is incentivized to do math is a failure of game design.
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Mate, some of us factorio nerds enjoy that shit
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Can confirm. A pretty significant amount of the time I've put into that game has been doing calculations on paper and then redoing them again after they turn out wrong.
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I'm glad for you, but count me out.
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I like maths. What game are you talking about?
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Not OP but Kerbal space program is far better when you have a mod that calculates delta V for you. Otherwise you have to manually recalculate everything every single time you make a small change to your rocket. And without knowing the delta V you have no hope of reaching many of the planets in the game
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I'm glad for you, and I'm happy to use math in every day life, but for me its work. Many games have this problem for me, but take any game with items that have numerical stats as the only way to differentiate them. So to compare two items the player has to look at the numbers. To me that moment is work, not fun. I prefer a graphical or audio representation of the difference. Maybe color or size indicates the gameplay difference. Something like that makes it more enjoyable to me.
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Real time with pause à la CRPG (BG, POE etc...)
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Fast travel with no cost
I don't like durability mechanics when its clearly there just to waste your time or money or whatever. Any game that makes you do more hiking to repair benches than fighting is either getting a thumbs down or I'm going to download a mod.
It is a fine line, like in Minecraft durability obviously makes sense, so it makes sense that other games try to emulate that. But then look at Stardew Valley, one of the most popular mods is the one that stops fences from degrading because repairing them is tedious.
I would totally be up for requiring more resources to craft a tool to not have it degrade ever.
Can you make fences out of stone or metal, or just wood, in SV? Because I recall Harvest Moon DS allowed you to make stone fences, which were a lot more likely to survive hurricanes and snowstorms
Breath of the Wild is generally pretty good about letting you explore your own way. For example, the exposition ghost at the start explicitly acknowledges you could go straight to the final boss after leaving the tutorial area if you want, and there are plenty of ways a determined player can reach areas faster than the typical progression routes would take them.
But my goodness the pitiful weapon durability made me want to avoid combat. I distinctly remember coming across a white lionel relatively early and determining I shouldn't bother trying to fight simply because I didn't have enough weapons to get through its health bar.
Yup. I played through BotW always holding onto things I thought were good because the stupid durability mechanic made me hoard stuff.
When I started TotK I decided to turn durability off and see if I enjoyed more and I absolutely did. Made the game way better. The only thing that broke was some balancing around crafted weapons. For example you can take a stick and slap a horn on it and get a very powerful, but brittle, weapon. With durability off it just becomes a very powerful weapon, which pretty much matches or beats any proper weapon you can find. If you think that's too hacky you can just make a rule for yourself not to craft things like that.
Many games have gone through this and time and time again scarcity makes people not use things. In Witcher 2 you had to craft potions manually by collecting all the ingredients each time. In Witcher 3 they just replenish after a rest if you have alcohol on you. 2 is more realistic, but the work involved (and the fact that you had to drink them before combat started) made them too much of a pain and I just went without. In 3 you can simply use them and not worry.
I played BotW with 4x durability mod and it was soooo much better.
I expected to do the same for TotK, but the fusion system made things infinitely more durable than the breaking garbage weapons of BotW, so I didn’t have to mod durability in.
I built a self-repair skill mod for Fallout New Vegas specifically because I hated that shit.