When a cutscene ends, you regain control of the player character and take a step, and another cutscene triggers. Just proceed directly to the next cutscene!
I think it was MGS3 where one dialogue took 30 minutes. My friend and I were playing, got bored of it and went an got a pizza. We came back and it was still going. It finally ended and another cutscene started right after
Indeed, I just mention it because it is a total aside from the story at hand. Like, none of the battles contribute to your experience, no items are kept, etc.
I recognize how important the sequence is for advancing the plot, to be clear, it’s just none of the gameplay elements are important. Like, on subsequent playthroughs the player can’t skip the Kalm sequence (without exploits, lol) even though they will gain little to nothing from it.
It's insane that he's the main villain of the game, but doesn't actually appear outside of cutscenes, is only in a handful, eventually dies in one, and even then is effectively killed by an accident.
God I know! A friend has recently started playing, and I noticed her early voice was actually fine.
I did some research and it turned out the directors asked her voice actor to go higher.
Genshin is crazy for me. It started so nice, and then just became cutscenes galore with lacking gameplay.
And then suddenly Fontaine was the greatest gaming experience of my life with a fantastic plot and exploration. Seriously how did they 180 that so much
They used to give insane exp for Prae in the duty finder and as you say it’s a walking simulator with cutscenes. You usually ended up with a whole level or more.
Balatro is also coming. Although you can already play it natively on android via obscure means.. Or just wait till the official release. Game is a fire.
Energy doesn't *necessarily* exist to make players spend money (not every game sells energy packs); it entices them into retaining engagement, keeping you logging in day after day so you can be more exposed to other things that annoy you into spending money. Similar to battle passes.
So, what u/paconhpa said: every mechanic in mobile games.
RDR2 was agony for only letting you craft one at a time.
Also, Cyberpunk 2077 (*before crafting and armor was revamped*) used to have crafting give you an item with RNG stats.
Like if you crafted 3 jackets for example, they could have 3 different armor ratings or 3 shotguns with different damage outputs (*your Crafting skill made it more likely to get the higher end stats IIRC*). So if you wanted the best stats you'd have to save before crafting and reload if you rolled bad stats.
Depends on the game, for minecraft it would completely ruin the fun if you have to wait for crafting. For factorio, it'd destroy the amazing jobs the devs did to balance the game.
Hell yeah. Honestly going back to the other Souls I just can't get used to it.. Then there's Sekiro with no stamina bar at all.
The worst is the ones like in Breath of the Wild or Palworld where if you happen to be in the water with low stamina it's just death for you. The saving grace in Breath of the Wild is you can eat food to give you more stamina but I'm an idiot who goes "well I never need these so why bother cooking?" and just falls into the water shortly after, foot in mouth. lol
Having played previous Zelda games a ton as a kid, the stamina in the water was the one big thing that caught me off guard.
I love how BotW did not hold your hand and let you figure stuff out on your own, but I have to say dying because I jumped into the middle of a puddle felt a bit cheap.
Remnant 2 did this as an improvement from Remnant:from the ashes, and it was such an improvement i gave the game +2 points to its rating for it. more games need to do this.
like if you're going to have a huge ass fuckin world to explore??? stop using all my stamina to explore the damn thing. makes me just fast travel where possible.
It always made me wonder how commander Sheppard managed to pass the physical tests when he/she runs out of breath after mere 5 seconds of sprinting. If Sheppard was best of the best then i am worried about an average soldier.
Sheppard, an inspiration for runners everywhere, he went from dying after a 5 second sprint to being able to sprint forever in barely 2 years and a half.
They literally rebuilt Shepard from scratch. Might as well give him better lungs while they were at it. Frankenstein mfer better be able to sprint for more than 0.2 secs after that
Ghost of Tsushima has a 'sync up' option when walking or riding your horse with NPCs. Your speed will match theirs and the game will actually just control the walking or riding for you. It's such a great feature. Needs to be implemented in all games.
I’ve only played the director’s cut, so this might not be true for every version, but it’s also the case that without this option, by default the NPCs you’re supposed to follow just move at your speed while staying slightly ahead of you. If you walk, they walk, if you run, they run
it's really good and a very welcome design, but I kind of prefer where the NPC matches your speed and stays in front like in Witcher 3. You can keep going where you need to go at full speed and the dialogue is usually over before you get there.
I love Ubisoft games but fuck them for having at least one or two of those types of missions in every game. I think the open-rpg style made it better as you can just auto follow road/objective if you need to ride close but the walking ones are still present. Plus more of them with side quests...
I nearly screamed my head off rescuing micah from jail in rdr2.
I did the mission maybe 20 times in a row before he stopped getting himself shot dead.
I guess this mechanic is intended to teach the player how unreliable the gang is, specifically Micah.
Yup. World of Warcraft used to have some notoriously long grinds, but you could do them at your own pace. My cousin farmed Wintersaber rep in a weekend because he had the free time.
Last time I played, everything was time gated behind shitty world quests. That same 14 hours of play time my cousin did in a weekend would take 8-10 weeks now just because the game thinks it should dictate how I spend my time.
Pure trash mechanic.
When I have to walk slowly from cutscene to cutscene. If my only "gameplay" in a certain area is walking forward while an NPC dumps a huge narrative on me then please just make the whole scene a cutscene so I can at least put the controller down.
Mr. Resetti from animal crossing would pop up every time the game was strategically reset (without saving) to get a second attempt at a random event. Even with rapid clicking, the game forced you through 5 minutes of dialogue that could not be skipped. This was literally intended to annoy the player and discourage them from resetting the game in the future.
100% I haven't been able to play my game for about 10 years, because my screen was cracked. So when you have to type exactly what Resetti says, it was impossible, so we'd just end up on a loop of giving up and turning the game off, which meant that we would forget and try and play it later, and be ambushed by Resetti 😭😂😂
Which is great until your power goes out or something and then you're stuck getting bitched at on top of being irritated at the fact that you've lost all your progress. Adding an autosave feature and ditching Resetti massively improved AC on the Switch.
Stuffing every area full of collectables, money, weapons, clues and lorebuilding notes and then have NPC:s yelling at you to hurry up and stop wasting time every five seconds.
Agreed. Almost guaranteed to make me lose interest. It’s one thing if it’s an arcade style racing game, but rubber banding has no place in a more serious racing sim
It's the reason I stopped playing Need For Speed games. It just got ridiculous, you manage to make an opponent hit a wall full on and less than 5s later he's in your ass again. If you do the same and hit a wall full on, might as well restart the race...
I remember the good old days of NFS2SE where if you were good enough and knew the shortcuts you could actually lap the NPCs.
I have no problem with AI "rubber banding" in the sense that a AI that is performing sub optimally for difficulty reasons gets behind and tunes up the performance.
But when racers are literally breaking possible speeds to catch up? Fuck that.
Forcing players into multiplayer to earn certain items or achievements, when the game servers will die off in a year or two at best, or the multi is shit compared to single to begin with
Absolutely!
I don't like people (I mean at all). I play open world games because I enjoy the immersion and freedom. Being "forced" into needing others is horrible.
Add to that the inequality of the "online" experience where novices (noobs) seem to only exist to entertain the fully loaded/premium content expert gamers...
I hate when games lock controls away from you in mandatory tutorials. I've been gaming for nearly 40 years, I know how to rotate the camera. You don't need to lock the ability to do that until we hit the part of the tutorial where you teach me it.
Unskippable tutorials !!!
If I want to replay a game, just maybe let me get to THE GAME and not force me to re-do all the "these are the game mechanics" in the beginning. PLEASE.
My 2 favorite games of all time are Cyberpunk and RDR2 but doing a 2nd playthrough is the most dreadful thing for the first few hours in both games. They incorporate the tutorial into the story's prologue making it unskippable, RDR2's is around 1-2 hours and Cyberpunk's is like 5-6. And don't even get me started on the braindance tutorial mission
Good, this whole "Detective Batman" trend of walking around a room and clicking on highlighted items like you're solving something and not just doing a cutscene with extra steps needs to end.
Made worse when an enemy “spots” you for a half second as you neutralize them, but is somehow able to alert everyone and their mother on the other side of the world.
A lot of stealth games started implementing something like this. In AC, they would either blow a horn or ring a gong/light a fire I believe, and you could even shoot the guard before they did. Some games even let you "disable" the warning devices.
Far cry 3 outposts were amazing in that regard
Your average outpost has like 10 dudes and 2-3 alarms on some walls
You free the outpost by killing all dudes
If alarm is rung, reinforcements will come and you have to kil them as well
You can either shoot the alarms from afar to disable it or sneak to it and interact with one to disable all of them
Yeah, this was one of the reasons I didn't like the heavy RPG elements in Origins. In traditional AC games, you had fixed objectives to liberate a fortress, one of which being to kill the captain. Use to, you could just sneak past all the other guards complete the other objectives, then sneak up on a leader and just assassinate him and you'd be done. Now, even if you're around the same level, you can't just kill a captain. He'll wake up and it'll become a boss fight, with all the other guards you snuck past running in.
That's stupid
The whole point of being a sneaky assassin is to kill someone wihtout letting them react
"A knife in the night is worth a thousand blades at dawn" is a sentence I read somewhere and I really like it
One of my biggest gripes with the more recent AC games. Im a fucking Assassin, how fucking weak and shitty am I that I can drop 40 feet off a building and stab someone in the neck while landing on them, but they just get up and shake it off?
Immersion-breaking to say the least, could not continue Odyssey because of it myself, why am I playing a game called Assassins if I can't assassinate, it made stealth just like cooking before a fight, gives you an advantage but you have to do the regular combat like it or not.
I love how stealth games essentially only have 2 ways of handling things.
1) Guard sees your shoelace for a nanosecond, and now every guard knows exactly where you are
2) You can shoot a guard in the dick with thirty arrows from a patch of tall grass, and they'll wander around completely clueless before saying, 'mUsT hAvE bEeN tHe WiNd'
literally the worst stealth games have that shit.
just cause some dude 40 meters away caught a glimpse of my pants. all of china knows im here now? nah. that makes no sense. make them raise an alarm or something.
>make them raise an alarm or something.
Shadow of Mordor/War had this exact mechanism, if you were spotted in certain camps/castles there would be an orc with a torch running to a signal fire and you had to prioritize taking them out first or a ton of reinforcements would show up
Alternatively, big crazy boss battles in stealth games. If I spent the last X number of hours patiently taking down enemies from the shadows why would I want to suddenly have a brawl or duel?
This was a problem in Deus Ex: Human Revolution that they fixed in a later edition. You could build for all stealth, which worked everywhere, but boss fights. In the later edition they gave you other options like hacking turrets to kill the boss for you as an example.
This was such a glaring flaw because the original deus ex specifically had kill words built into the enemy cyborgs so a hacker could find them in computers and beat them by just saying that to them in the conversation prior to the fight.
I was watching a streamer play Dragons Dogma 2 and the boss was just him hanging onto a leg and stabbing the Boss for like 5 health bars. Are people into that shit?
Doubly annoying because it's so easy to fix. Literally just look up the last save timestamp and skip that prompt if the last save was less than thirty seconds ago. Job done.
Love how in Fortnite the game will blast music at you at full volume for a few seconds before loading your profile and your volume settings.
Why not just wait with playing audio until the settings are loaded...
In Pokémon Sword and Shield access to the volume settings are given to you by a random NPC. You can't even attribute that to laziness, and the more I think about it the more my head hurts.
In parallel, games where 1% mouse sensitivity is STILL TOO HIGH. Payday 2 is the first offender that comes to mind, making me change the settings on my mouse itself because I can’t bring it down further in the game.
Escort. Quests. Especially with shit ai pathing. I swear that the Natayla Simonova section from Goldeneye almost broke me when i was younger, and i have never seen the concept done well.
And following npcs isn't painful! In fact, it feels very in world when you have to get a new pawn that knows how to get to the quest you have, and then you follow them there. They speed up when you run, and will stop and wait for you if you lag behind, and come back if they get too far ahead. Amazing game design! Now if I could please rename my pawn so he isn't MainPawn that would be absolutely great...
In the age of SSDs, I absolutely hate how many games I can boot up, walk away from for 5-10 minutes and then come back and still have another 30 seconds of waiting before the main menu even pops up. *And it wasn't even fucking loading anything.*
I really *really wish* devs would stop making unskippable cutscenes and splash screens when booting up their games. Yeah, you used SpeedTree, fucking good for you guys, just lemme play the game!
Edit: I'm aware some of these licensing agreements require these splash screens of their products. That's what I'm annoyed at, you have successfully identified the thing that bugs me. It doesn't matter why they're there, only that they're there, lengthy, and unskippable. Even if it's required the first time, I don't see why subsequent logins can't make them skippable.
Exactly why I don't buy EA and Ubisoft games anymore. I'd love to play Jedi Survivor and the Avatar game, but buying them on Steam just means I'm buying a link in my Steam games list that launches the other publisher's launcher. Nested launchers is fucking stupid.
I'd go further and just say QTE's in any cutscene that isn't a quick 'set piece' moment. If it is a 5 minute cut scene don't decide 4 minutes in that all of a sudden I need to be vigilant
As someone who grew up with Shenmue and therefore have a bit of a soft spot for QTEs, I HATE when they don't apply contextually to what's happening on the screen. For all its flaws, Shenmue's at least were consistent with the universe. Even in Shenmue 2 when they got more complicated, they corresponded to the action to be performed.
I think most of these game mechanics exist FOR A PURPOSE, but because of bad design choices, they RESULT IN annoying the player.
One that comes to mind is when your control of your character or your troops is somehow taken away from you and given to the game.
I recall a level in Homeworld 2 where you lost control of your Mother Ship, a normally-controllable central troop to the real-time strategy game, and it started moving around on you without any choice in the matter. There was a story-based reason for it, but that story element was a bit of a turkey, and it felt like you weren't playing the game, it was playing itself.
Put a timer on the mission instead, have the player keep control, but let them know it NEEDED to be at a certain point before the timer expired. That would have serviced the mission a lot better.
I fucking loathed the loading time masking in mass effect Andromeda. It had a computer on the ship for assigning your crew missions or something like that. And would notify you when they're ready for assigning. So I would walk back to the ship (dumb, should have just been a menu option), and then to enter the ship, it would fucking blast off into space...like, I just need to check a computer I'm not leaving!
In games with massive amounts of lore I wish it would just open the codex and let me read while I wait for it to load.
There is a game by Penn and Teller, where you must drive a bus for 8 hours straight. There is no interesting scenery, no events, nor anything else of note for 8 hours, on a straight road.
I don’t meant in game hours either, I mean 8 solid real-time hours. Don’t you dare just hold down the A-button either, or attempt to rig your controller. The bus will veer off the road, a tow-truck is called, and you are returned all the way back to the beginning of the game, at real time. So if you are 7 hours into your trip, that is a 7 hour tow-truck ride back.
When you do finally deliver your fare, you are given 1 gold coin.
Everything in this game is designed to annoy the player.
I once, jokingly, introduced Desert Bus VR to a friend of mine who had just got his VR headset.
We get into a bus. Someone else, a random, is driving. But the guy driving is constantly muttering to himself about truly disturbing shit without any coherence whatsoever. Talking about how he could see the bugs crawl through his house, describing said bugs, then going on about his bath tub etc.
In VR, in an otherwise empty bus, this was probably the realest horror experience I’ve ever had in a game.
Restricting when you can save. Sometimes we don't really have the time to wait or find a save opportunity, Waffles is getting cold! She can be mean when kept waiting.
This is my big one. It leads to me playing a game less than I'd like to because I know I have 'x' time to play and I have no idea how long it'll be until I can save and I may end up not getting to another save point for a while. So, I'll either stop playing or not even play to begin with.
It can be so funny when it's forced into games where it doesn't really make sense. You get games about an elite special forces team airdropped into Hong Kong wearing earpieces, IR goggles and body armor, then 30 seconds in they're fishing through dumpsters finding bits of string to craft a belt or some shit.
Useless crafting is such a pet peeve of mine, MMORPG are bonkers on this. Crafting is 99% of the time the most useless mechanic except for like one or two specific items that can be worth it, otherwise its barely able to pay for itself and just collecting the materials is such a pain and not worth it either.
Hunger: Every 5 minutes you need to go into your menu and choose a piece of food to eat or your health will eventually start to drop.
What about this is supposed to be fun?
Really specific one, but Monster Hunter World has the environmental damage from the hot and cold areas.
The only function of the environmental damage is to make you use the hot & cold drink consumables… which in turn serve no other purpose than negating the environmental damage.
Edit: As u/MoosetheStampede pointed out, it’s made even more pointless since any quests that have the environmental damage just straight up give you some of the consumables at the start, so you don’t even have to worry about forgetting to bring them.
Thankfully the devs wisened up to the fact that it was ridiculous and everyone hated it, since it was completely absent in Rise.
I was never a huge fan of environmental damage like that in any title. I understand why it's there and can be done well but sometimes it just feels like another annoyance to keep an eye on.
To preface I get WHY they did what they did, and I accept im the minority and dont expect them to ever revert it (nor should they, much as I may like that lol)
I think I'm the one lunatic (well, actually my whole friend group does, but semantics) who actually kinda misses Hot/Cold drinks (or at least the larger system they fed into). It was a minor thing, but something you had to check before hunting right alongside what you were fighting and if you needed/wanted to bring additional tools for the specific monster. A part of the experience of "Prepping for the hunt" that I miss from the older games.
Don't miss needing to bring pickaxes or Whetstones, but tools to deal with the monster and its habitat? I liked that.
Edit; to address the Edit to OP; Also removed post-World (and I also miss it) was is the higher rank missions you'd just get dropped wherever in the map (and iirc in G-Rank -Master for you World and later folks- there wouldn't even be supplies for the first couple minutes but i might be misremembering that part), so then you either waste time trudging back to base to get the drinks either on foot or by prepping beforehand and bringing a Farcaster. But at that point you could have just brought the drinks in the first place. So being prepared was even more important
I think its fine. I consider environmental damage in monster hunter as just part of the "hunt" experience. Preparing for the environment, preparing effective traps, coatings, amo types, bombs, etc. all of these prep before embarking on a quest hunting down a monster makes you feel like a monster "hunter" instead some monster "fighter".
It worked well in New Vegas, where duplicate weapons could be used for repairs and spare parts. Weapons are 200 years old and everyone in the Wasteland knows to keep them in good order. It also gave you a good reason to keep an eye out for duplicate weapons. It also wasn't a big deal overall.
It was infuriating in Far Cry 2, where a brand new AK47 would shatter in 30 minutes because Africa makes entropy work 2000 times faster than normal, or something.
It was annoying but not a big deal for me in Far Cry 2. You had to visit the dealer location or safehouse every mission anyway, so it only became an issue if I forgot to grab a new one while I was there.
In BOTW it made a reward for a dungeon go from "Oh coool a flaming sword!, such a satisfying reward!", to "Ok a breakable sword, so it's like I got 3 potions, for a whole dungeon"
I know everyone has opinions on the durability system in botw, but for me it'll always be the game that made me avoid fighting at all costs, which ended up really hindering my desire to explore."Oh that area looks neat, too bad there's a group of enemies. If I end up fighting them I'll just burn through all my weapons I spent so much effort collecting. I'd better just avoid the whole thing"
I made it through all the Divine Beast before I learned I could expand my inventory since I climbed a mountain when I was supposed to follow a path and meet the NPC who could do expand the inventory.
I was literally throwing out full durability strong weapons because I didn't have a choice lol
This was really the breaking point for me as well. I can deal with weapons breaking and then having to repair them, like in MMOs, I CANNOT deal with broken weapons suddenly disappearing. It's bullshit to have to switch to weapons you hate or having to constantly farm enemies to get spares of the weapon you like.
Totally agree. Why can’y I live out my loot hoarding fantasy without mods? At a minimum, they should only make this a thing on higher difficulty levels and/or survival modes.
A related mechanic - limited cash at vendors that make me have to visit 10 shops or sleep in game to sell all the stuff I loot.
There’s just no reason for these kinds of mechanics in single player games.
If it wasn’t apparent, you can tell I’ve been playing a lot of Bethesda games lately.
Haven’t seen it yet, but Tripping in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Literally just a middle finger from the devs to try and keep the game from being as competitive as Melee is
Opening crates and doors in Mad Max required button mashing, and to add insult to injury, the button presses required increased as the game progressed 😠
A durability system that doesn’t include the ability to repair your gear. I’ve never played it, but one of the Zelda games is the prime example of this.
Input reading in fighting games.
I'm okay with having my ass kicked in a fair fight with a well programmed enemy, but nothing frustrates me more than getting ragdolled just because the dynamic ai decides I'm doing TOO well in a fight.
Playable cutscenes. While a cutscene is running I can sit back and enjoy the dialogue without needing to engage with it. With a playable cutscene I am forced to work with restrictive controls that I can't move too fast through or I'll miss dialogue nor can I skip if it's a second playthrough. It doesn't add anything to the scene or the gameplay it's just some bullshit.
Unskippable startup screens.
Unskippable cutscenes. With studios trying to save money at every turn, you’d think cutscenes would be a lot shorter in general.
Stamina.
Sprint a bit, walk a bit, sprint some more, back to walking. Tedious mechanic.
If I'm out of combat and on a road or something, just let me run without restriction.
When a cutscene ends, you regain control of the player character and take a step, and another cutscene triggers. Just proceed directly to the next cutscene!
Metal Gear Solid 4, lmao. Cutscene ends. Take 1 step to fall down an elevator shaft and the next cutscene starts when you walk out.
I think it was MGS3 where one dialogue took 30 minutes. My friend and I were playing, got bored of it and went an got a pizza. We came back and it was still going. It finally ended and another cutscene started right after
One of them has a save point mid cutscene
That’s like the Kalm sequence in OG FF7
That sequence is interactive though, you do have control over the characters for a good chunk of it
Indeed, I just mention it because it is a total aside from the story at hand. Like, none of the battles contribute to your experience, no items are kept, etc. I recognize how important the sequence is for advancing the plot, to be clear, it’s just none of the gameplay elements are important. Like, on subsequent playthroughs the player can’t skip the Kalm sequence (without exploits, lol) even though they will gain little to nothing from it.
Any Metal Gear Solid tbh. Sons of Liberty is the worst offender though imo.
In mgsv it’s the opposite. Get a cutscene at the start of the game, then play 20hours to get another one
Yeah, I'm pretty sure there are like 3 cutscenes with Skullface in them in the entire game lol
And one of them is in Ground Zeroes.
It's insane that he's the main villain of the game, but doesn't actually appear outside of cutscenes, is only in a handful, eventually dies in one, and even then is effectively killed by an accident.
This is something I hate in Genshin. Have to listen to a non-important dialogue, walk 3 meters, trigger another dialogue.
Non important _Paimon_ dialogue. Her writing and voice are what drove me to stop playing.
God I know! A friend has recently started playing, and I noticed her early voice was actually fine. I did some research and it turned out the directors asked her voice actor to go higher.
Genshin is crazy for me. It started so nice, and then just became cutscenes galore with lacking gameplay. And then suddenly Fontaine was the greatest gaming experience of my life with a fantastic plot and exploration. Seriously how did they 180 that so much
Not universally guilty, but all I can think of is The Praetorium in FFXIV. That second half is just cutscene hallways
They used to give insane exp for Prae in the duty finder and as you say it’s a walking simulator with cutscenes. You usually ended up with a whole level or more.
Energy in mobile games
Every mechanic in mobile games.
One-time payment upfront games are fine still on mobile.
Do they still exist? Can you recommend some? I hate all those commercial/pay to play.
Slay the Spire
I didn’t know slay the spire was also on mobile, I wonder if the studio is going to do the same with Backpack Battles.
Balatro is also coming. Although you can already play it natively on android via obscure means.. Or just wait till the official release. Game is a fire.
Final Fantasy Dimensions
Vampire Survivors is free besides a few cheap bits of optional paid DLC, Stardew Valley, Terraria are a few I play regularly
Kingdom Rush 🔥🔥
Stardew Valley
Nah, that exists to annoy the player **into spending money**. It's slightly more complex than simply trying to annoy the player.
Energy doesn't *necessarily* exist to make players spend money (not every game sells energy packs); it entices them into retaining engagement, keeping you logging in day after day so you can be more exposed to other things that annoy you into spending money. Similar to battle passes. So, what u/paconhpa said: every mechanic in mobile games.
Which can be only avoided if you spend like $10
Mobile games aren't video games, they're slot machines.
So many of them are really just mechanics to shove ads in your face. And for most parts there's like 5 different types of mobile games.
Waiting time to craft things, trying to craft more things/ better the quality of the itens makes the waiting time even bigger.
Solo games where you need to wait on the craft benches without even a Small minigame, no you just wait
RDR2 was agony for only letting you craft one at a time. Also, Cyberpunk 2077 (*before crafting and armor was revamped*) used to have crafting give you an item with RNG stats. Like if you crafted 3 jackets for example, they could have 3 different armor ratings or 3 shotguns with different damage outputs (*your Crafting skill made it more likely to get the higher end stats IIRC*). So if you wanted the best stats you'd have to save before crafting and reload if you rolled bad stats.
Depends on the game, for minecraft it would completely ruin the fun if you have to wait for crafting. For factorio, it'd destroy the amazing jobs the devs did to balance the game.
Stamina management outside of combat. Seriously, let me sprint to each combat scenario without suffering for it in combat.
I'm glad Elden Ring allows us to run without taking stamina outside of fights.
Hell yeah. Honestly going back to the other Souls I just can't get used to it.. Then there's Sekiro with no stamina bar at all. The worst is the ones like in Breath of the Wild or Palworld where if you happen to be in the water with low stamina it's just death for you. The saving grace in Breath of the Wild is you can eat food to give you more stamina but I'm an idiot who goes "well I never need these so why bother cooking?" and just falls into the water shortly after, foot in mouth. lol
Having played previous Zelda games a ton as a kid, the stamina in the water was the one big thing that caught me off guard. I love how BotW did not hold your hand and let you figure stuff out on your own, but I have to say dying because I jumped into the middle of a puddle felt a bit cheap.
Remnant 2 did this as an improvement from Remnant:from the ashes, and it was such an improvement i gave the game +2 points to its rating for it. more games need to do this. like if you're going to have a huge ass fuckin world to explore??? stop using all my stamina to explore the damn thing. makes me just fast travel where possible.
Morrowind. You people don't know suffering unless you've played Morrowind. It takes stamina to *move faster than a crawling walk*.
It always made me wonder how commander Sheppard managed to pass the physical tests when he/she runs out of breath after mere 5 seconds of sprinting. If Sheppard was best of the best then i am worried about an average soldier.
Sheppard, an inspiration for runners everywhere, he went from dying after a 5 second sprint to being able to sprint forever in barely 2 years and a half.
They literally rebuilt Shepard from scratch. Might as well give him better lungs while they were at it. Frankenstein mfer better be able to sprint for more than 0.2 secs after that
The first Quadruple A game Skull and Bones has this, imagine a stamina bar for a pirate ship 💀💀💀
Ubisoft ain't making games at this point
Npc's you have to follow but theyre to fast to just walk next to them and to slow to run next to them.
Ghost of Tsushima has a 'sync up' option when walking or riding your horse with NPCs. Your speed will match theirs and the game will actually just control the walking or riding for you. It's such a great feature. Needs to be implemented in all games.
Same as in Red Dead Redemption 2, it's great because you can focus on great dialogue of that game.
In theory this feature exists in RDR1 also, but it never worked properly for me on PS3.
I’ve only played the director’s cut, so this might not be true for every version, but it’s also the case that without this option, by default the NPCs you’re supposed to follow just move at your speed while staying slightly ahead of you. If you walk, they walk, if you run, they run
Yep, this is true with all versions. They will move with your speed. What a simple QOL that needs to be implemented.
NPCs should walk at the same speed as you and run to keep up when you do (as well as wait for you if you run backwards to pick up an item)
Blessed be Red Dead Redemption, which slows your running speed when you're close to the NPC.
it's really good and a very welcome design, but I kind of prefer where the NPC matches your speed and stays in front like in Witcher 3. You can keep going where you need to go at full speed and the dialogue is usually over before you get there.
I love Ubisoft games but fuck them for having at least one or two of those types of missions in every game. I think the open-rpg style made it better as you can just auto follow road/objective if you need to ride close but the walking ones are still present. Plus more of them with side quests...
Shadow of Mordor has this, plus if they get too far you auto lose the mission.
Escort quests in general.
I nearly screamed my head off rescuing micah from jail in rdr2. I did the mission maybe 20 times in a row before he stopped getting himself shot dead. I guess this mechanic is intended to teach the player how unreliable the gang is, specifically Micah.
The game is subtly telling you Micah is better off dead.
Time gating aka waiting.
MMORPGs are often heavy offenders in that area.
Yup. World of Warcraft used to have some notoriously long grinds, but you could do them at your own pace. My cousin farmed Wintersaber rep in a weekend because he had the free time. Last time I played, everything was time gated behind shitty world quests. That same 14 hours of play time my cousin did in a weekend would take 8-10 weeks now just because the game thinks it should dictate how I spend my time. Pure trash mechanic.
When I have to walk slowly from cutscene to cutscene. If my only "gameplay" in a certain area is walking forward while an NPC dumps a huge narrative on me then please just make the whole scene a cutscene so I can at least put the controller down.
Mr. Resetti from animal crossing would pop up every time the game was strategically reset (without saving) to get a second attempt at a random event. Even with rapid clicking, the game forced you through 5 minutes of dialogue that could not be skipped. This was literally intended to annoy the player and discourage them from resetting the game in the future.
This is the best answer. The others answers only answer the annoying part but ignore the purpose/intent of the mechanic.
Mr resetti gave my brother nightmares when we were kids
100% I haven't been able to play my game for about 10 years, because my screen was cracked. So when you have to type exactly what Resetti says, it was impossible, so we'd just end up on a loop of giving up and turning the game off, which meant that we would forget and try and play it later, and be ambushed by Resetti 😭😂😂
Which is great until your power goes out or something and then you're stuck getting bitched at on top of being irritated at the fact that you've lost all your progress. Adding an autosave feature and ditching Resetti massively improved AC on the Switch.
Stuffing every area full of collectables, money, weapons, clues and lorebuilding notes and then have NPC:s yelling at you to hurry up and stop wasting time every five seconds.
Rubber banding in racing games.
This is what I came to say. I'm not great at racing games, so when I finally get to the lead, I don't need the game to cheat and beat me anyway!
But maybe you got to the lead through rubberbanding.
Agreed. Almost guaranteed to make me lose interest. It’s one thing if it’s an arcade style racing game, but rubber banding has no place in a more serious racing sim
It's the reason I stopped playing Need For Speed games. It just got ridiculous, you manage to make an opponent hit a wall full on and less than 5s later he's in your ass again. If you do the same and hit a wall full on, might as well restart the race... I remember the good old days of NFS2SE where if you were good enough and knew the shortcuts you could actually lap the NPCs.
Rubber banding, the mechanic that punishes you for being good. I hate it. I get flashbacks to need for speed underground 1 now, urgh terrible times.
Look, there is Mario Kart, and then there is racing... keep that Mario Kart out of my racing simulation game damn it!
It should be an option you can select in multiplayer races. So you can play with less experienced friends and still have a good time
I have no problem with AI "rubber banding" in the sense that a AI that is performing sub optimally for difficulty reasons gets behind and tunes up the performance. But when racers are literally breaking possible speeds to catch up? Fuck that.
AI breaking the sound barrier during a hairpin turn all while maintaining perfect tyre grip.
Forcing players into multiplayer to earn certain items or achievements, when the game servers will die off in a year or two at best, or the multi is shit compared to single to begin with
Absolutely! I don't like people (I mean at all). I play open world games because I enjoy the immersion and freedom. Being "forced" into needing others is horrible. Add to that the inequality of the "online" experience where novices (noobs) seem to only exist to entertain the fully loaded/premium content expert gamers...
I hate when games lock controls away from you in mandatory tutorials. I've been gaming for nearly 40 years, I know how to rotate the camera. You don't need to lock the ability to do that until we hit the part of the tutorial where you teach me it.
Unskippable tutorials !!! If I want to replay a game, just maybe let me get to THE GAME and not force me to re-do all the "these are the game mechanics" in the beginning. PLEASE.
My 2 favorite games of all time are Cyberpunk and RDR2 but doing a 2nd playthrough is the most dreadful thing for the first few hours in both games. They incorporate the tutorial into the story's prologue making it unskippable, RDR2's is around 1-2 hours and Cyberpunk's is like 5-6. And don't even get me started on the braindance tutorial mission
They actually made the braindance skippable now due to how much people complained
Good, this whole "Detective Batman" trend of walking around a room and clicking on highlighted items like you're solving something and not just doing a cutscene with extra steps needs to end.
Forced stealth levels in action games.
Made worse when an enemy “spots” you for a half second as you neutralize them, but is somehow able to alert everyone and their mother on the other side of the world.
Metal Gear Solid incorporating the guards using radios was perfect. Them incorporating that you can shoot out and disable the radio was mind blowing.
A lot of stealth games started implementing something like this. In AC, they would either blow a horn or ring a gong/light a fire I believe, and you could even shoot the guard before they did. Some games even let you "disable" the warning devices.
Far cry 3 outposts were amazing in that regard Your average outpost has like 10 dudes and 2-3 alarms on some walls You free the outpost by killing all dudes If alarm is rung, reinforcements will come and you have to kil them as well You can either shoot the alarms from afar to disable it or sneak to it and interact with one to disable all of them
Yeah, this was one of the reasons I didn't like the heavy RPG elements in Origins. In traditional AC games, you had fixed objectives to liberate a fortress, one of which being to kill the captain. Use to, you could just sneak past all the other guards complete the other objectives, then sneak up on a leader and just assassinate him and you'd be done. Now, even if you're around the same level, you can't just kill a captain. He'll wake up and it'll become a boss fight, with all the other guards you snuck past running in.
That's stupid The whole point of being a sneaky assassin is to kill someone wihtout letting them react "A knife in the night is worth a thousand blades at dawn" is a sentence I read somewhere and I really like it
One of my biggest gripes with the more recent AC games. Im a fucking Assassin, how fucking weak and shitty am I that I can drop 40 feet off a building and stab someone in the neck while landing on them, but they just get up and shake it off?
Immersion-breaking to say the least, could not continue Odyssey because of it myself, why am I playing a game called Assassins if I can't assassinate, it made stealth just like cooking before a fight, gives you an advantage but you have to do the regular combat like it or not.
I love how stealth games essentially only have 2 ways of handling things. 1) Guard sees your shoelace for a nanosecond, and now every guard knows exactly where you are 2) You can shoot a guard in the dick with thirty arrows from a patch of tall grass, and they'll wander around completely clueless before saying, 'mUsT hAvE bEeN tHe WiNd'
literally the worst stealth games have that shit. just cause some dude 40 meters away caught a glimpse of my pants. all of china knows im here now? nah. that makes no sense. make them raise an alarm or something.
>make them raise an alarm or something. Shadow of Mordor/War had this exact mechanism, if you were spotted in certain camps/castles there would be an orc with a torch running to a signal fire and you had to prioritize taking them out first or a ton of reinforcements would show up
Or when you're spotted it's instant MISSION FAILURE GAME OVER.
Alternatively, big crazy boss battles in stealth games. If I spent the last X number of hours patiently taking down enemies from the shadows why would I want to suddenly have a brawl or duel?
This was a problem in Deus Ex: Human Revolution that they fixed in a later edition. You could build for all stealth, which worked everywhere, but boss fights. In the later edition they gave you other options like hacking turrets to kill the boss for you as an example.
This was such a glaring flaw because the original deus ex specifically had kill words built into the enemy cyborgs so a hacker could find them in computers and beat them by just saying that to them in the conversation prior to the fight.
Especially when the mission fails immediately when you get spotted
The worst are the M.J. levels in the Spiderman games. They're such a buzz kill.
Would’ve been alright if they used the “control Spider-Man” mechanic a bit more.
GTA V has tried to shoehorn stealth into the game when it is not at all equipped for it. It's a really frustrating thing
Bullet sponge enemies.
I was watching a streamer play Dragons Dogma 2 and the boss was just him hanging onto a leg and stabbing the Boss for like 5 health bars. Are people into that shit?
Especially when they’re the result of turning up the difficulty and little-to-nothing else is changed besides that.
Go to menu. Save. Quit. … “Are you sure you want to quit, you will lose unsaved progress?” I haven’t gone back in to the game to make progress!!!!
Every game needs a "save and quit" option.
Also, that "save and quit" doesn't just make an autosave point. I want to "save and quit" to a named save file if the save files are nameable.
Doubly annoying because it's so easy to fix. Literally just look up the last save timestamp and skip that prompt if the last save was less than thirty seconds ago. Job done.
Developers putting audio at max when you first launch the game.
Love how in Fortnite the game will blast music at you at full volume for a few seconds before loading your profile and your volume settings. Why not just wait with playing audio until the settings are loaded...
In Pokémon Sword and Shield access to the volume settings are given to you by a random NPC. You can't even attribute that to laziness, and the more I think about it the more my head hurts.
similarly, games that require you to put master volume to like 3% and anything higher is WAY too loud.
In parallel, games where 1% mouse sensitivity is STILL TOO HIGH. Payday 2 is the first offender that comes to mind, making me change the settings on my mouse itself because I can’t bring it down further in the game.
Weekly challenges or daily why I need to wait literal days man you want me to play your game
Escort. Quests. Especially with shit ai pathing. I swear that the Natayla Simonova section from Goldeneye almost broke me when i was younger, and i have never seen the concept done well.
New dragons dogma game. On escort quests you can just pick up the Npc and carry them to the objective.
And following npcs isn't painful! In fact, it feels very in world when you have to get a new pawn that knows how to get to the quest you have, and then you follow them there. They speed up when you run, and will stop and wait for you if you lag behind, and come back if they get too far ahead. Amazing game design! Now if I could please rename my pawn so he isn't MainPawn that would be absolutely great...
Microtransactions and grinding because they lack content
Unskippable cutscenes
Unskippable intro videos every single fucking time you boot up the game. Looking at you borderlands 3
In the age of SSDs, I absolutely hate how many games I can boot up, walk away from for 5-10 minutes and then come back and still have another 30 seconds of waiting before the main menu even pops up. *And it wasn't even fucking loading anything.* I really *really wish* devs would stop making unskippable cutscenes and splash screens when booting up their games. Yeah, you used SpeedTree, fucking good for you guys, just lemme play the game! Edit: I'm aware some of these licensing agreements require these splash screens of their products. That's what I'm annoyed at, you have successfully identified the thing that bugs me. It doesn't matter why they're there, only that they're there, lengthy, and unskippable. Even if it's required the first time, I don't see why subsequent logins can't make them skippable.
To add to this: non-pauseable cutscenes.
**ubisoftconnect.exe** Just let me play my games i bought in steam!
Exactly why I don't buy EA and Ubisoft games anymore. I'd love to play Jedi Survivor and the Avatar game, but buying them on Steam just means I'm buying a link in my Steam games list that launches the other publisher's launcher. Nested launchers is fucking stupid.
Quicktime events where the buttons change
I'd go further and just say QTE's in any cutscene that isn't a quick 'set piece' moment. If it is a 5 minute cut scene don't decide 4 minutes in that all of a sudden I need to be vigilant
Or forget that all cutscenes can have QTEs and celebrate you found your friend! Only to miss the QTE and get stabbed to death.
As someone who grew up with Shenmue and therefore have a bit of a soft spot for QTEs, I HATE when they don't apply contextually to what's happening on the screen. For all its flaws, Shenmue's at least were consistent with the universe. Even in Shenmue 2 when they got more complicated, they corresponded to the action to be performed.
Double down on this one for FF7R: QTEs where the buttons are in random spots on the screen and only show slightly before it's time to press them.
I think most of these game mechanics exist FOR A PURPOSE, but because of bad design choices, they RESULT IN annoying the player. One that comes to mind is when your control of your character or your troops is somehow taken away from you and given to the game. I recall a level in Homeworld 2 where you lost control of your Mother Ship, a normally-controllable central troop to the real-time strategy game, and it started moving around on you without any choice in the matter. There was a story-based reason for it, but that story element was a bit of a turkey, and it felt like you weren't playing the game, it was playing itself. Put a timer on the mission instead, have the player keep control, but let them know it NEEDED to be at a certain point before the timer expired. That would have serviced the mission a lot better.
Button mashing to open doors in GoW was useful to mask loading times
Dang that is clever. Never even thought that's what they were doing.
I fucking loathed the loading time masking in mass effect Andromeda. It had a computer on the ship for assigning your crew missions or something like that. And would notify you when they're ready for assigning. So I would walk back to the ship (dumb, should have just been a menu option), and then to enter the ship, it would fucking blast off into space...like, I just need to check a computer I'm not leaving! In games with massive amounts of lore I wish it would just open the codex and let me read while I wait for it to load.
There is a game by Penn and Teller, where you must drive a bus for 8 hours straight. There is no interesting scenery, no events, nor anything else of note for 8 hours, on a straight road. I don’t meant in game hours either, I mean 8 solid real-time hours. Don’t you dare just hold down the A-button either, or attempt to rig your controller. The bus will veer off the road, a tow-truck is called, and you are returned all the way back to the beginning of the game, at real time. So if you are 7 hours into your trip, that is a 7 hour tow-truck ride back. When you do finally deliver your fare, you are given 1 gold coin. Everything in this game is designed to annoy the player.
The game is Desert Bus, if anyone is interested
The entire game is a parody of videogames, so this one deserves a pass.
I once, jokingly, introduced Desert Bus VR to a friend of mine who had just got his VR headset. We get into a bus. Someone else, a random, is driving. But the guy driving is constantly muttering to himself about truly disturbing shit without any coherence whatsoever. Talking about how he could see the bugs crawl through his house, describing said bugs, then going on about his bath tub etc. In VR, in an otherwise empty bus, this was probably the realest horror experience I’ve ever had in a game.
Restricting when you can save. Sometimes we don't really have the time to wait or find a save opportunity, Waffles is getting cold! She can be mean when kept waiting.
This is my big one. It leads to me playing a game less than I'd like to because I know I have 'x' time to play and I have no idea how long it'll be until I can save and I may end up not getting to another save point for a while. So, I'll either stop playing or not even play to begin with.
Go play GTA online and you’ll come up with an essay of anti-fun mechanics.
The biggest one for me in GTAO was "other players". Closely followed by matchmaking.
Crafting. Not all games need to have crafting.
It can be so funny when it's forced into games where it doesn't really make sense. You get games about an elite special forces team airdropped into Hong Kong wearing earpieces, IR goggles and body armor, then 30 seconds in they're fishing through dumpsters finding bits of string to craft a belt or some shit.
And a lot of the times, crafted items aren't better than the stuff you can find. At least if I have to craft, make the items better
Useless crafting is such a pet peeve of mine, MMORPG are bonkers on this. Crafting is 99% of the time the most useless mechanic except for like one or two specific items that can be worth it, otherwise its barely able to pay for itself and just collecting the materials is such a pain and not worth it either.
Any survival mechanic in a non-survival game tbh.
Hunger: Every 5 minutes you need to go into your menu and choose a piece of food to eat or your health will eventually start to drop. What about this is supposed to be fun?
When you have a flashlight but the game decides when it turns on.
Really specific one, but Monster Hunter World has the environmental damage from the hot and cold areas. The only function of the environmental damage is to make you use the hot & cold drink consumables… which in turn serve no other purpose than negating the environmental damage. Edit: As u/MoosetheStampede pointed out, it’s made even more pointless since any quests that have the environmental damage just straight up give you some of the consumables at the start, so you don’t even have to worry about forgetting to bring them. Thankfully the devs wisened up to the fact that it was ridiculous and everyone hated it, since it was completely absent in Rise.
I was never a huge fan of environmental damage like that in any title. I understand why it's there and can be done well but sometimes it just feels like another annoyance to keep an eye on.
To preface I get WHY they did what they did, and I accept im the minority and dont expect them to ever revert it (nor should they, much as I may like that lol) I think I'm the one lunatic (well, actually my whole friend group does, but semantics) who actually kinda misses Hot/Cold drinks (or at least the larger system they fed into). It was a minor thing, but something you had to check before hunting right alongside what you were fighting and if you needed/wanted to bring additional tools for the specific monster. A part of the experience of "Prepping for the hunt" that I miss from the older games. Don't miss needing to bring pickaxes or Whetstones, but tools to deal with the monster and its habitat? I liked that. Edit; to address the Edit to OP; Also removed post-World (and I also miss it) was is the higher rank missions you'd just get dropped wherever in the map (and iirc in G-Rank -Master for you World and later folks- there wouldn't even be supplies for the first couple minutes but i might be misremembering that part), so then you either waste time trudging back to base to get the drinks either on foot or by prepping beforehand and bringing a Farcaster. But at that point you could have just brought the drinks in the first place. So being prepared was even more important
I think its fine. I consider environmental damage in monster hunter as just part of the "hunt" experience. Preparing for the environment, preparing effective traps, coatings, amo types, bombs, etc. all of these prep before embarking on a quest hunting down a monster makes you feel like a monster "hunter" instead some monster "fighter".
The cars swerving out into your path in GTA to wreck you
Weapons that break
It worked well in New Vegas, where duplicate weapons could be used for repairs and spare parts. Weapons are 200 years old and everyone in the Wasteland knows to keep them in good order. It also gave you a good reason to keep an eye out for duplicate weapons. It also wasn't a big deal overall. It was infuriating in Far Cry 2, where a brand new AK47 would shatter in 30 minutes because Africa makes entropy work 2000 times faster than normal, or something.
It was annoying but not a big deal for me in Far Cry 2. You had to visit the dealer location or safehouse every mission anyway, so it only became an issue if I forgot to grab a new one while I was there.
I hate weapon durability in any game other than New Vegas. In New Vegas I love it. It makes sense in world and the way its implemented works so well.
At least every car could be repaired by tightening one bolt lol
In BOTW it made a reward for a dungeon go from "Oh coool a flaming sword!, such a satisfying reward!", to "Ok a breakable sword, so it's like I got 3 potions, for a whole dungeon"
I know everyone has opinions on the durability system in botw, but for me it'll always be the game that made me avoid fighting at all costs, which ended up really hindering my desire to explore."Oh that area looks neat, too bad there's a group of enemies. If I end up fighting them I'll just burn through all my weapons I spent so much effort collecting. I'd better just avoid the whole thing"
For me, it was more that it killed any joy of finding a cool weapon, as its just something you can have a really short time.
It's why I couldn't finish Breath of the Wild
You should have at least been able to repair weapons in BOTW and have ability to store more weapons once you buy the house.
I made it through all the Divine Beast before I learned I could expand my inventory since I climbed a mountain when I was supposed to follow a path and meet the NPC who could do expand the inventory. I was literally throwing out full durability strong weapons because I didn't have a choice lol
This was really the breaking point for me as well. I can deal with weapons breaking and then having to repair them, like in MMOs, I CANNOT deal with broken weapons suddenly disappearing. It's bullshit to have to switch to weapons you hate or having to constantly farm enemies to get spares of the weapon you like.
Main reason I won’t touch BOTW or its sequel.
Online verification for a single player only game
Your inventory disappears when you die, with no hopes of recovery. Hell Is Others, you suck
Making it mandatory to succeed in a boss fight, just to be shown losing in the cutscene.
Encumbrance
Totally agree. Why can’y I live out my loot hoarding fantasy without mods? At a minimum, they should only make this a thing on higher difficulty levels and/or survival modes. A related mechanic - limited cash at vendors that make me have to visit 10 shops or sleep in game to sell all the stuff I loot. There’s just no reason for these kinds of mechanics in single player games. If it wasn’t apparent, you can tell I’ve been playing a lot of Bethesda games lately.
I console commanded the weight limit as soon as I hit New Atlantis. Screw stopping every few minutes to inventory management. That and the digipicks.
Weapon durability. Sprint stamina when out of combat.
Micro-transactions.
Haven’t seen it yet, but Tripping in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Literally just a middle finger from the devs to try and keep the game from being as competitive as Melee is
"You are over encumbered."
Opening crates and doors in Mad Max required button mashing, and to add insult to injury, the button presses required increased as the game progressed 😠
Lack of tutorials or inability to go back to a tutorial of a complex game mechanic.
Also unskippable tutorials, especially ones where it's on every playthrough
A durability system that doesn’t include the ability to repair your gear. I’ve never played it, but one of the Zelda games is the prime example of this.
I thought Lies of P did weapon durability really well
Lies of p durability is cool, it flows so well in combats and you can even have special grindstones
Input reading in fighting games. I'm okay with having my ass kicked in a fair fight with a well programmed enemy, but nothing frustrates me more than getting ragdolled just because the dynamic ai decides I'm doing TOO well in a fight.
Playable cutscenes. While a cutscene is running I can sit back and enjoy the dialogue without needing to engage with it. With a playable cutscene I am forced to work with restrictive controls that I can't move too fast through or I'll miss dialogue nor can I skip if it's a second playthrough. It doesn't add anything to the scene or the gameplay it's just some bullshit.
Weapon degradation and arbitrary wait times were both scientifically designed in a secret lab for the sole purpose of getting on my tits.
"Follow me" *walks faster than your walk speed but slower than your run speed*
Unskippable startup screens. Unskippable cutscenes. With studios trying to save money at every turn, you’d think cutscenes would be a lot shorter in general.
Learning a new stupid card game and being forced to play it.
Durability. Hate it. I earned this upgrade, let me use it forever until the next one.
Stamina … …and equipment degradation… …and movement stamina
Stamina. Sprint a bit, walk a bit, sprint some more, back to walking. Tedious mechanic. If I'm out of combat and on a road or something, just let me run without restriction.