Like many, I hate forced stealth sections/level in action games - especially if they are “auto-fail” and you have to start completely over. Bonus hate if you have been kickin’ ass up to the point of the game where this happens and the reason you have to use stealth, instead of your skills/weapons, is completely contrived.
I have not played Mad Max, but it did remind me of the reason why I stopped playing Arkham Knight - that boss tank battle, which I assume/hope is near the end, since I am replaying the remasters of the two earlier games. It was endlessly boring to fire one shot and then race around for five minutes until the enemy got stuck on something for a brief moment and I could get off a cheap shot. The whole time I was thinking “I am frickin’ Batman, I own a jet! Heck, I probably have a rocket launcher if I wanted to snipe this thing from the rooftop/railway… which I mysteriously jumped down from into the cloud of poisonous gas…”
That’s one way people have discovered to cheese it, but I think the intended way was to fight the left side archer first in melee, and then deal with the right side archer. If you run up and then left to the walkway where the second archer is, you can block line of sight to the right side archer. You only have to fight them one at a time if you go that way. There’s even treasure at the end of that walkway to reward you for killing the left side archer.
Dark Souls and Bloodbourne…every boss battle. I loved the games when it was running around, exploring, brawling, and figuring ways past tricky enemies and environments. Then, at peak fun and flow, the games halt into gated die/reload/repeat boss-battle drudgery. They never felt like skillful wins, instead they felt like I was just being punished into memorizing patterns.
Arkham Asylum has been mentioned for a few, but there was a horrible section fighting waves of multiple big behemoth guys, the ones that require stuns and jumping on backs, that was controller-smashing frustration due to poor cameras and button command responsiveness.
True, that bit is quite out of place. That said, the first three aren’t that bad and those on PC can use the console command TCL to make the fourth much less of a hassle.
Ludovic’s example reminds me of another one: In Sid Meyer’s Alpha Centauri, your cities generate eco-damage, and when your eco-damage gets too bad, Planet starts sending targeted xenoworm attacks against you. Towards the endgame, it can become overwhelming. Now, there’s a way to mitigate this eco-damage, by building certain structures in your cities. Note the key word: By building them, not by having them. And it only starts counting how many you’ve built after the first xenoworm attack. So if you’ve been trying to play the game green, building those structures as soon as you can, you’ll still get fungal uprisings against you, and then you won’t be able to do anything about it, because you’ve already built all of the eco-buildings you can. Well, technically, you can raze the buildings and rebuilt them, but unless you already knew about how this bizarre mechanic works, why would you do that?
I’d go so far as to say that every hand-to-hand fight in Arkham Asylum was a “bad part” because of that. I just hated the controls. I’d walk up to an enemy, press the attack button, and it’d randomly attack someone in proximity, and only by luck would I hit what I intended to. It really looked cool but was largely nonfunctional. By the time Arkham City was released they’d smoothed things out and it worked how it was supposed to (and that fighting system was also great in Mad Max and Shadow of Mordor). But in Arkham Asylum it was a mess.
I loved all the platforming, puzzle-solving, and the stealth play (taking out goons from the shadows and watching them panic because they don’t know what’s happening was so satisfying). Those parts of the game were great. But get into a fight and ugh.
Any ‘quicktime’ event. I don’t know what the “X” button or the “O” button is. I just play by feel. And now, I feel like I missed some important scene and am possibly on a sub-obtimal path.
Eh. I think RD was fine as an endgame mechanic - after all, it’s either that or the previous Total War standard of “I’ve already won but I have to spend some 100 turns mopping up the dismal remnants of everyone else on the map piecemeal with my unstoppable stacks”. Plus it was advertised way in advance and there’s a helpful bar telling you exactly how close you are to being the entire island’s buttboy.
Sure, some mechanics could have been handled better - it would have been better IMO if your game-long allies stayed on your side instead of having to go “curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal !”. The warhammer games work that part better. But on the whole, I’m okay with Realm Divide. And it feels properly Sekigahara-ish.
[QUOT**E=Arrogance Ex Machina;21197763]Mandatory stealth sections in any game, be it Witcher 2 or Ni No Kuni 2 or whatever. If the game isn’t a stealth game, don’t add a stupid section with incredibly powerful enemies (or instant game over). Another way to piss me off is to include some sort of platforming in a non-platforming game. At least Borderlands 2’s Tiny Tina DLC made it so if you failed a few times, it removed the platforming bit completely.
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Basically any platforming element in a FPS. I couldn’t play Turok at all.
Finding ingredients to make armor/ weapons. I spent over an hour in one of the Final Fantasy games trying to find the ingredients to one of the characters best weapon.
Too many side quests. As much as I like Mass Effect I feel like the games have too many side quests. On the surface Morrowind seems like a great game, but it’s basically one side quest after another. This isn’t the first game where I’ve nearly forgotten what the main quest was either.
Escort missions. Bad AI seems to make the guy I’m escorting suicidal.
I didn’t think it was possible, but there are stupid escort missions in a solo board game: Gloomhaven, where the character you are escorting will always move toward the goal room by the swiftest means possible even if it means becoming a target in the process.
Escort missions traditionally came in two flavors: suicidal and snail. Both are frustrating for their own reasons.
Newer games seem to have figured it out. In Warframe, there’s a mission type where you make your way to where an ally is held prisoner, free them, and you have the option of giving them your secondary weapon to use. Then they follow you like a combat pet and actually help you fight, but they aren’t indestructible and you have to make it to the escape point without letting them die. It’s pretty slick and the first time I actually enjoyed an escort mission in a game.
Related to what Atamaslama wrote about escort missions, it floored me when I learned that you, in Stalker of Chernyobyl, could trade ahead of time with the scientist you escort from the helicopter crash site, and thereby give him things like an actual rifle, bandages, a replacement environment suit. Stuff where he actually could help you, instead of being the kamakaze PITA that level reminds me of. Probably would’ve helped too when you go to keep all of the zombies off him at Yantar.
Ha ! We just did that mission the other weekend and yeah, we hated that asshole. He will even open new rooms which, because he acts last in the turn, means that the party can’t even react to all the monsters he unveils, who proceed to shit out damage at him ! Thankfully our team of the moment is heavy on summons and stuns so we could jam his way for a couple turns in the third room, giving us some breathing room while we mopped up his wake of retardation.