Unpopular opinions - game mechanics

I hate manual path-setting. In the original Theme Park and most tycoon-type games since you had to tell your janitors or others what routes they needed to follow. It seemed and seems like the worst sort of micromanagement. I hated it so much in Theme Park I was sure others must feel the same and it’d go away. No luck.

I like the escort missions in Gloomhaven, but I’m thinking that doesn’t count.

High five.

[Wanted to reply to SamS, not Guap thus the deleted post.]

I don’t think it’s popular so much as it’s a cheap and easy way to save having to develop a competent AI for them. It was always such a pain in Theme Hospital when all your handymen ended up in a big clump chasing the same jobs, while the rest of your hospital went slowly to ruin. Easier to offer pathing or zoning tools to let the player waste some time to keep things running smoothly.

Relatedly, console sports games with overcomplicated control schemes in general. Fuck you, Madden, I don’t want four different buttons for after-the-catch running, just give me a one button contextual evasion move. I wouldn’t have thought this would be unpopular, but based on the trend for most sports games it is.

I felt that way with the unnecessary jump from 2 buttons in super Mario Bros to 12 in the SNES version.

That’s because it is.

I am willing to tolerate RTWP, but lord knows it’s nowhere near as good as turn-based and I get really annoyed at people who try to assert that it’s the same.

I have no problem with the much-derided tropes of Ubi open-world games. As long as the scenery and traversal of the world are enjoyable, I’ll gladly spend hours finding feathers, clearing icons, and climbing to high points.

For those who don’t like the complicated controls of newer sim-ish sports games, they all generally have options for simplified control schemes. MLB the Show (clunky name, that) can basically be played with the X button and the left analog stick. I think Madden can, as well. Not sure about NBA 2K, as the right stick dribble moves are more ingrained in the control scheme.

Yes. I’ve tried the first Pillars about a dozen times, because I know that I’m missing out, but I just can’t do these. I never could finish BG, and all these apparently awesome RPG’s because I can’t handle this :)

If they had a ‘everyone rolls initiative’ and then I get to go turn-based…yay! But they aren’t, so :(

I never beat the Baldur’s Gates either, just felt too unwieldy and they never grabbed me. Kind of interesting that I never minded the real-time combat in KOTOR, maybe the smaller party size and fewer characters to manage just made it feel more natural.

Yeah, the only two games in which I didn’t mind Real Time with Pause was KOTOR and Neverwinter Nights 2. The thing both games had in common is that they allowed you to press “X” on the controller to queue up a command in addition to letting you press “A” on the controller to override the queue and do a command immediately. (And the keyboard equivalent of that in NWN2).

I always thought that was a much better system for RTwP than what they had in Baldur’s Gate, etc, and then later in Dragon Age and Pillars of Eternity, etc.

Yeah I could handle the KOTOR games fine. Which confuses me even more now. Thanks dive^3.

Speaking of game mechanics, I always liked the “both make turned based moves at the same time and turn is resolved in real time” mechanic. The only game I can think of that uses it is Combat Mission 1-3. There must be others.

KOTOR had a small party with limited combat options. Much less to manage than Pillars or BG.

That said, personally I would rather a large party and lots of options… in turn-based combat.

Does Frozen Synapse and Frozen Cortex count?

I could cope with RTWP in Planescape: Torment because there wasn’t much combat and there were fewer characters to deal with but I could not handle Pillars of Eternity. It was like herding cats.

Sticking with the thread topic - stuff everyone seems to like or hate but which I feel the opposite, there are a couple of big ones:

  • mining. Everyone seems to hate it because it’s so simple and repetitive in games like No Man’s Sky. But I find it relaxing and enjoyable for some reason. Same with harvesting resources in RPGs like Skyrim - I love finding a new patch of metal, lol.

-magic items/loot in RPGs. I find “getting great loot” to be one of the least interesting parts of RPGs, and leads to a lot of busywork. Also prefer low-magic settings. For some reason it bothers me less in non-fantasy settings like Fallout, maybe because it feels less setting breaking (not that the quantity of firearms in Fallout isn’t silly). But being rewarded through looting is one of the big reasons I get bored of action-RPGs and MMOs as those aspects don’t interest me.

Heh, I liked it too. Because it did basically nothing new. Sometimes a by-the-numbers licensed game can be a nice change of pace. A reasonable amount of button-mashing engagement without a challenging learning curve. It almost seems subversive in the Dark Souls hurt-me-some-more age.

A while back I did a 1000/1000 run on Walt Disney’s Brave just so I could not think for a while. Even then, they tried to put some challenge in about halfway through the game and ticked me off a bit. I don’t want a craft-brewed beer, I just want a can of Diet Sprite.

WoW has been losing my interest for almost exactly those reasons. I loved the deep and complex crafting systems and the learning and thought behind them. Then Blizzard started burning down professions, limiting or eliminating stuff like gems, glyphs, enchantments, and handing people ore and herbs. Crafting became all about logging in every day to use cooldowns to ‘earn’ that profession’s currency. Classes started being super-simplified with 2 or 3 button rotations, and less differentiated. Stamping out the complexity took a lot of the fun out of it for me, makes it feel more like being a hamster on a wheel, pushing buttons on the busy-box.

I loved the Mako missions in Mass Effect. Absolutely adored them…

NOT!!!

I loved the combat system in Final Fantasy XII. I know some hated it and thought it played itself but it was actually very engaging and combat was challenging enough that it was no cakewalk no matter how good you were at “programming” your heroes.

Same goes for XIII. The combat system in that game was enjoyable. Too bad about everything else.

Also, I hate open world games where there is stuff too do every few steps. Is this an unpopular opinion? I know gamers like their games stuffed with content and many complain when a game is too short, but I’d rather not have nine small sized, mildly dangerous caves within a quarter mile radius of town. That’s just silly.

I’d rather have one really big cave that is nowhere near town and that is going to kick my ass if I make a silly mistake or am unprepared. And I don’t need every town to have 30 quests.

Yes, I AM talking about the Elder Scrolls games.

I hate big cities in RPGs, especially isometric RPGs. They are tedious, boring, and almost always a stopping point for me.