Game timers. I want to screw around on my time. The more time-based a game becomes, the less I enjoy it.

Radiant quests. You can never complete the game because of this, the quests are generic and repetitive and offer nothing but "stretch the playtime".

That and mechanics like "rando dragon attacks in Skyrim" and "City is under attack" from Fallout 4. I quit F4 because I was on my way to a mission and got the "city under attack notification, and on my way to defend another city was under attack.

Pay 2 win and excessive abuse of FOMO.

E.g. for the next two weeks you can purchase/grind for [character] with a LIMITED EDITION green hat!

It would be OK if such thing was behind an achievement and allowed to be gained later.

Some companies have gotten a little sneaky with it, like Microsoft with age of empires. They make their newly released DLC civs overpowered for two months then nerf it every time.

Escort quests. Stealth sections in games that aren't built around stealth would be close second.

Less of an issue nowadays but unclimbable knee-high walls which force you to go round. Always drove me crazy!

Unrepairable weapons are the worst thing. There's nothing worse than finding a super cool, rare weapon and being paranoid about it breaking.

Anything using timers, especially based on the clock. It just artificially adds playtime, and it also means I forget about them and lose track of what I was doing most the time, too.

The new Gollum game was very impressive in the way it managed to implement so many of the mechanics in this thread

Any sort of intense micromanagement of units, resources, etc. I've got like 16kb RAM in my brain. I can barely remember what I ate today lol.

Also, invisible walls that make absolutely no sense. Maybe just all invisible walls, really.

Obligate stamina bars/circles for traversal. Just allow me to move at the speed of fun, and definitely don't make me stand still to recharge when climbing.

I think it's telling that death stranding, a game all about traversal, let's you sprint outright for as long as you want until well after your character's shoes literally fall off. The stamina bar is more a measure of abuse rather than a limit on your movement.

For me, the absolute worst is when the game effectively punishes you for not constantly menu diving to change your equipment.

Some random examples:

Disco Elysium - your clothes have a MASSIVE effect on some specific stats which influence dialogues. In order to get the best outcomes, you have to change your clothes before an interaction with another character.

Ghost of Tsushima - you get separate armor sets for different activities, which is not too bad, except one of the sets is for exploration. So every time you switch between combat and riding your horse, if you don't switch your armor sets, then it feels that the game is punishing you.

I love both of those games, but really really hate that mechanic.

Sadly, the whole "rogue" genre if that counts as a mechanic. I don't enjoy replaying everything over and over again in different ways in a system where its designed one should fail eventually, so you must lose to continue. It sounds great on paper but hell it really sucks. Also, turn based stuff.

Offline games which require an internet for no apparent reason has to be my pet peeve

Quicktime events. Please make up your mind if you show me a sequence or if you want me to play. I can enjoy watching, but I don't want to feel like I am being tested for paying attention.

The beginning of the Tomb Raider remake pissed me off especially. You played a few minutes, then watched a minute of sequence, then play, watch, play, watch. One of the sequences took like 5 minutes, so I leaned back to enjoy when suddenly it flashes a heavy PRESS X in my face. I tried to quickly grab the controller but failed... too slow. I almost rage quit.

I am not playing games to get stressed out...

Perhaps not specifically a mechanic, per se, but save points. I want to be able to save whenever, wherever. I don't always have time to make it to the next save point before I need to stop playing.

Quick-time events but SPECIFICALLY the ones that give you way too little time to react. Like, I never mind them too much, especially the ones in the Yakuza series, but I remember there was this game on the Wii called Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings that would throw these inputs WAYY too fast at you.

non-renewable consumable items.

using consumables is hard enough, but you're telling me there's a finite number of these? forget it.

only exception is rougelikes.

In any competitive game, golden snitch mechanics. If I'm kicking ass all game, I shouldn't instantly lose for making one tiny mistake at the 11th hour.

Hunger or thirst mechanics in anything that's not explicitly a survival game.

Card games that get bolted on to other genres. cough genshin cough

Enemies that scale with your level in an RPG. I would rather get completely curb stomped by rare high level enemies, so I have something to work towards. In the same vein, I don't like it when the stat gain you get from leveling ends up with you literally being unkillable by lower level enemies. Most MMOs are an offender to this, where you can just sunbathe in a group of 30 level 1 enemies and are unable to die to them.

• Excessive grinding or padding in a game just for the sake of it or for microtransaction reasons.
• Microtransaction and pay-to-win models in full price $70 games...
• Overuse of Quick time events Press E to dodge etc etc
• Escort missions when developers want to pad their game out
• Terrible stealth mechanics when an enemey spots me when im standing still in a bush from the other side of the map

Squad/micro-strategy mechanics in fps games. Commanding npcs to do specific things in the middle of a gunfight isn’t fun. Bonus points if the npc ai gets in your way when you're not fighting as well.

Bad tutorials. Don't teach me the game mechanics that could be learned in-game in an environment different from the rest of the game. Also dislike sudden lore dumps after the tutorial.

Mechanics in games where they don't belong. Not every game needs skill trees, not every game needs stories or lore.

Consumables.

They either offer too little for a too short time or too much too easy.

I haven't seen a game where consumables are promoted from the get-go and are easy to use and not a hussle or completely broken.

Alaloth has a great iteration of consumables but I still wouldn't say it's fun as a standalone mechanic.

People have said escort quests but I'm going to go more specific.

Escort quests WHERE THE NPC INEXPLICABLY HAS A DIFFERENT WALKING/RUNNING SPEED THAN THE PLAYER.....

I hate how in a lot of retro games water kills you instanly.

Daily quests or login rewards, things to force me to play the game, always stop playing

Cutscenes for repeated actions like in the Zelda series. Having to dig through the menu to perform simple actions.

Probably simple, mindless side/fetch quests. Defeat enemies, get loot, run it back, rinse and repeat. It also is incredibly dry to watch as well as actually do yourself.

Escort missions

I'm not a big fan of fishing mechanics, they're usually shallow "press button at random signal, get a random prize" mechanics.

Also escort missions where the NPC being escorted does not understand that it should protect its own life. I don't mind repeating a mission due to my own mistakes, but I don't want to do it because some AI went potato.

Loot

I hate collecting it, managing inventory, selling it, crafting it, and so on. I used to love it, but these days I much prefer a more guided experience where the only items I get are interesting. Elder Scrolls completely destroyed this whole mechanic for me because I'm a bit obsessive and would try to bring literally every plate back to town to sell.

As a corollary, I'm not a fan of dealing with shops in general. I'm fine if they exist, but I really think the game should supply you with everything you need to complete the game, and shops should be a backup plan, not a core mechanic.

Gacha. I can tolerate lootboxes but when lootboxes are the central feature, I'm out.

Combo attacks - I'm not coordinated to hit the buttons in order fast enough. I tried Black Desert when it was free and this was the dealbreaker for me, though it wasn't the only thing that bugged me about the game.

I cannot jump. Not for the life of me. I mean I do press space at the right moment, but somehow I miss, or it's just not working, I keep falling down or to my death. That's why platformers aren't for me sadly, even though I'd like to play them. I cannot do jumping puzzles in Guild Wars 2, I even struggle in Doom! Please, I'll do everything, but don't make me jump!

Flowcharts for multiple endings. Let me take multiple distinct routes from the start, or make a choice at the end I can come back to. I hate going through some of the same content again and again and having to look up guides just to find the true ending (looking at you Persona).

Death penalties. Any game that seriously penalizes you for dying is just so frustrating for me. I understand that there has to be some form of reason to not die but please, at worst just reload an earlier save for me (and make sure you have frequent autosaves too).

If I lose all my items on death I'm just reloading a save. If I have to respawn at a checkpoint ten thousand years away I'm going to be very mad. If I have to listen to someone monologue to me every time I die I'm refunding your game.

Quest systems, especially in linear games. All is does is clog up the UI, and if you need to constantly tell me what to do and where to go, is your game really designed that well?

I think forced stealth mechanics in games not designed for them are my pet peeve. Looking at you Witcher 2.

Endless monologues and dialogue-dependent quests. Tell me what to do once, then be happily surprised when it's done. I don't need to know why it's important to uncle Sandy to find the green gate key, he can say "Thanks!" later if I want to talk to him at all.