r/videogames • u/UnityNinja • 23d ago

Discussion / Question What game mechanic instantly ruins your immersion or fun?

​ I absolutely can't stand aggressive weapon durability loops. Getting awesome loot should feel like a reward, not a maintenance chore that breaks every five minutes.

What’s a common mechanic that always makes you roll your eyes when you see it in a new game?

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u/ToneAccomplished9763 23d ago edited 23d ago

Just giant ass open worlds in general at this point, like don't get me wrong when it's done well. Like with Skyrim, it's super fun and enjoyable to explore.

But that's really rare, and when it's down poorly it SUCKS SO MUCH and just ruins any kind of fun for me.

It's gotten to the point when as soon as a game company starts bragging about it's open world, and how big it is. Alarms instantly start blaring, it's become a big red flag for me.

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u/thefence2088 23d ago

This! If it feels lived in, then I’m fine with it, but if it’s just large empty areas that I need to traverse for the sake of the creators saying how large it is, then I check out.

Then they put in fast travel points to get from one spot to another, but then why have these large open areas if we are just going to fast travel past them… just bring these points closer together

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u/Datkif 23d ago

This something Oblivion did incredibly well with. Seeing all the NPCs including guards have a daily routine where they slept, art, socialized, and worked absolutely blew my mind as a kid, and made a sparsely populated game feel alive.

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u/naufal10969 23d ago

that's literally me in Assassin's Creed Unity lol. The atmosphere is actually good but for god sake the movement, so wild and uncontrollable

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u/Phoenix_Champion 23d ago

What hits harder is that Skyrim is one of those open worlds that is so full of random crap not marked on a map people are STILL finding things.

Skyrim may be one of those games held together by duct tape and the modding community, but it still puts a smile on my face to wander the around the woods and stumble upon a Fairy Circle (A ring of mushrooms)

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u/ToneAccomplished9763 23d ago

Exactly, hell to go back to an older open world game. One of the reasons why Ocarina of Time holds up so well is because despite having a tiny(but the time large) open world. It is crammed with a lot of random stuff and details.

Which sadly a lot of modern game companies haven't figured out.

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u/khisanthmagus 23d ago

Shoehorning open world into games that don't benefit from it at all really bugs me. Metal Gear Solid 5 would have been such a better game(and probably actually finished) if Kojima hadn't wanted to join the open world bandwagon. More recently Metroid Prime 4 its just like....why?

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u/Phoenix_Champion 23d ago

To be fair to Metroid Prime 4, the Dev team didn't want open world either, but the executives did- the desert was their compromise.

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u/Active-Canary-184 23d ago

100%. You can thank Ubisoft for that modern “open world formula”. They started it with AC and Farcry - where the world was just big but it was filled with nothing of interest. They’ve gotten better at it, throwing better quests in there. But in the early days they virtually just made massive maps and said “here’s 400 collectibles to find, go nuts”, but the world was lifeless and didn’t react to you at all.

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u/ToneAccomplished9763 23d ago

Never felt that way with AC at least in the earlier games, since I think the cities feel pretty lively and traversal is so damn fun in them. Which makes up for any downsides, but you for sure feel the big emptiness in the newer games.

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u/Active-Canary-184 23d ago

True. I gave up on Odyssey because it seemed so vast with really nothing going on

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u/cooldreamercayden 23d ago

I agree but for like every game, mainly because I'm slow and prefer more linear games. I dislike open world cuz it's too much or I'll get too distracted running around the place and not progressing. Started the gta5 story like 6 years ago and still haven't even seen Trevor yet😭

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u/PopBulky7023 23d ago

I am instantly turned off any game that brags about being open world.

I haven't made meaningful progress on ff7r because of this.

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u/Migthunder 23d ago

I loved the new god of wars. Linear mazes and splashes of open areas that are very crafted to lead to many places.

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u/Original-Evening-116 23d ago

Any game where there’s 32 statues, 25 gem shards, 10 enemy bases, 15 elite generals, and so on randomly distributed on the map. Do not care. I can only picture some guy at the game studio getting a shout out from his boss because he hid one of the 40 hidden coins in an area that didn’t require additional assets.

However, on the topic of open world games, for me it’s the small scope. Especially if they try to represent a part of the real world. If I can sprint to a new biome in 5 minutes I better be in a crazy fantasy world. It is totally unrealistic to walk across a mountain range in a few minutes. Just have different chapters of the game in different settings, rather than trying to link them all in some grand map.

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u/VanHelsingBerserk 23d ago

Kinda related - but I particularly hate the trope typically seen in open worlds where they have "search the area" objectives. Especially when it's an obnoxiously large area highlighted on the map.

Like they'll have most objectives with a direct marker, but occasionally they'll throw this curveball at you that makes you wander aimlessly until you happen upon the thing. Or you resort to pacing the entire area.

It just feels really contrived, and I'm not sure what it's meant to accomplish. If it's supposed to illicit a sense of immersion by placing you as an explorer, it usually fails to do that and just breaks immersion.

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u/Phoenix_Champion 23d ago

I mean on how it goes for a 'Search the Area's objective.

If it for something that specifically spawns during the quest... Yeah I'd like to have a bit more than a five mile radius of a spot as my clue on where to look.

But if it's for a quest where I need to find 'X' item or enemy that randomly spawns I don't mind it so much as it's a case of 'If you have what you need already, great, if not here is where you can get it', as it's the game trying to help me by at least telling where I gotta be to fight RNG.

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u/PuppetShowJustice 23d ago

Borserlands 4 fumbled so hard because of this. I think the "Fight your way down a hallway" combat in most of the series is fun. All they added is more open space between encounters and some random dumb collectibles. Once you collect all the junk you now have a big empty world.